When it comes to building games, frameworks are what provide the tools for developers to do their job easier, without having to re-build every game component from the ground up, and also negate the developer from having to develop device drivers and the like. This not only saves time, but allows developers of games to concentrate on getting to the “nitty gritty” of games development, such as the way in which units behave, creating terrain, etc.
When embarking on the creation of an RTS Game, such as the game being developed by myself and Nick, the first question asked is “do we use an existing RTS Game engine (either written in our preferred language or ported), or do we create our own from scratch?”
We decided that given my lack of prior XNA knowledge, it would be best for my game development skills to create an engine from scratch. Not only would this allow our coding skills to become better, but this would allow us to create the logic for our game from the ground up, giving us full control of what the engine does and possibly give us a seperate product we can use to create further games. The only downside is, this approach inevitably takes much more time. This has probably been the single biggest contributing factor to the slippage in the development timescale of our game.
I remember talking to Nick about this subject during my recent visit to Birmingham and we eventually settled on an answer of whilst it is always down to the preference of the developer/development team, generally speaking by going straight into game development using an existing engine, developers will not get an appreciation for how the engine works at a code level (i.e. there may be things that could be improved or perhaps certain operations perform badly on a PS3). New developers entering game development should at least make a simple prototype game engine that demonstrates a grasp of key concepts, such as loading terrain, unit loading and maipulation, pathfinding for AI, etc. This means that when they come to use an existing RTS engine solution as a base for their games, they know what it does and the concepts behind the things it can do.