With many Europe-based businesses looking outside of the US for their technology in recent times, it looks like game engines might be one of the next major steps. Co-founder of Guerrilla Games and industry veteran, Arjan Brussee, who has also worked at Epic Games in the 1990s, has revealed that he is working on a new “European” game engine. The announcement comes after Brussee spent eight years at Epic Games as global director of product management on Unreal Engine.
Speaking to Dutch podcast De Technoloog, Brussee said that his goal was to make an engine that was fully hosted in Europe, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and laws. The engine has been dubbed the Immense Engine and is being designed with the goal of offering an alternative to game engines built in the US and China.
He also made note of the fact that, in this day and age, game engines are also used for projects outside of gaming. “Creating usable 3D worlds is becoming increasingly important, certainly for purposes other than just gaming,” he said.
Among the features of the Immense Engine will be full integration of AI tools from the ground up. Bringing up the fact that Unreal Engine and its contemporaries were “made for and by people who have to click through a menu with a mouse,” he said that, “If you want to change something, it has to be done for the entire engine.”
“The rise of AI means that we need to approach the development of this kind of crucial software differently,” Brussee explained. “As an old hand with a vision of how things should work, I see opportunities there.”
“If you are smart and know how to put a good framework of AI agents to work, you can do the work of ten or fifteen people.”
For the sake of comparison, Epic Games brought in a major upgrade to its Unreal Engine last year, which introduced a host of new features with the goal of maintaining a steady frame rate of 60 FPS in open-world games while still maintaining high levels of visual fidelity. Along with this, the engine also integrated MetaHuman Creator directly into its software, rather than needing plugins or other applications.
“With this release, one of our key goals was to empower you to build super-high-fidelity, large-scale open worlds that run smoothly at 60 FPS across current-generation hardware,” wrote Epic Games on its official website. “We’ve also made major strides toward a truly engine-first animation and rigging workflow, reducing the need for DCC round-tripping. Plus, MetaHumans can now be fully authored directly within the engine, unlocking a more streamlined and efficient creative process.”
Unreal Engine and Unity Engine make up the most commonly used game engines in the world, with a large number of projects making use of them. There have also been other engines to hit the market in recent years, including the open source Godot, which focused more on indie game development by offering design tools for 2D and 3D artists, along with integration with the well-known C# programming language.