A Survey of ‘Game’ Portability

Many games today are developed using game engines. This development approach supports various aspects of portability. For example games can be ported from one platform to another and assets can be imported into different engines. The portability aspect that requires further examination is the complexity involved in porting a 'game' between game engines. The game elements that need to be made portable are the game logic, the object model, and the game state, which together represent the game's brain. We collectively refer to these as the game factor, or G-factor. This work presents the findings of a survey of 40 game engines to show the techniques they provide for creating the G-factor elements and discusses how these techniques affect G-factor portability. We also present a survey of 30 projects that have used game engines to show how they set the G-factor.