Games and Learning

Is this the engine of the future?

Amazon’s announcement last month they were releasing Lumberyard, a free 3D game engine, was certainly good news for small studios looking for more development options, but convincing experienced educational programmers to switch up their preferred engine is a pretty hard sell.

But that doesn’t mean forward-thinking programmers won’t find a use for Lumberyard’s cloud-based services as classrooms continue to evolve into more tech friendly learning spaces.

Bottom line: is Amazon’s Lumberyard a big deal for educational game developers today?

“My first reaction is, ‘not really,’” said Arthur Low, engineering director for Filament Games. “I think it’s really just to help [Amazon] drive sales for Amazon Web Services (AWS).”

For Low, a seven-year Filament Games vet and lead developer on several of the educational studio’s previous games, the real question is whether educational games will continue to become more community-driven in the future.

If so, Lumberyard and its integration with GameLift, a new session-based multiplayer service based in AWS, could give small development teams the help they need to make games with entire school districts in mind, not just individual players.

“It’s something I’m curious about personally,” Low said. “[Educational developers] are in a unique position. On average, you have about 30 kids in a classroom. Their teacher could structure a lesson plan around games, have them all playing the same game, and working on the same problem at the same time. Lumberyard might have an impact on educational games down the road because, right now, it’s hard for small studios to get a handle on robust multiplayer experiences.”

Amazon seems determined to elbow its way into a competitive game industry, launching Amazon Game Studios in 2012 to compete in the mobile games market, and dropping nearly $1 billion on popular video game online streaming site Twitch in 2014. With Lumberyard, the ecommerce heavyweight is now offering developers access to a free engine with support across all platforms, including mobile and VR, without any license fees or revenue sharing. Instead, developers pay for access to GameLift, an attractive alternate to a small team, or individual, with neither the time or resources to set up the kind of infrastructure needed to support multiplayer gaming.

And small, indie studios have proven they can create games with as much impact as big triple-A commercial titles if they have help with their infrastructure from a tool that makes multiplayer gaming easier to manage.

But multiplayer considerations probably won’t affect the average educational developer unless classrooms and teachers become more comfortable with group-level educational gaming. Until then, there’s little incentive for a developer who’s already familiar with popular engines like Unity or Unreal Engine to make the switch to something new.

“No one’s made a game with it, yet,” said Low. “There are limited resources. Unity and Unreal already have very large communities. Hopefully, [Amazon] is out there supporting the engine and publishing documentation about their tools, but what’s better than that is someone who’s already done it.”

Only the largest commercial studios have an army of developers who can brute-force their way through potential engine quirks like user interface bugs and graphical glitches without help from an established community, something engines like Unity and Unreal have had for years and what Low believes are crucial to developers learning a new gaming engine.

“There are savants out there who don’t need that kind of support, but I was never one of them,” said Low.

Unity claims they are the most used game engine in the world, with nearly 50 percent of all market share and 4.5 million registered developers.

For Low, who cultivates Filament’s development crew and helps “shepherd” these kind of technical decisions, every studio has to decide if the right project will come along that needs a new tool like Amazon GameLift and the AWS Cloud.

“For example, for [Filament] it’s like going from Flash to Html5 to Unity,” he said. “When you implement a new tool, you lose speed and knowledge. So the questions is: does this project really need to be shared with the world and other students?”

It’s also worth noting that Lumberyard is a licensed offshoot of CryEngine which Amazon is taking in a new direction, and developers already familiar with Crytek’s engine may want to give it a closer look.

Another big selling point for Lumberyard is its integration with Twitch and its growing community of gamers who form intimate relationships with specific games and the often eccentric personalities who market their own unique style of gameplay. With the exception of Minecraft, they are virtually zero games which inspire a popular Twitch streamer to broadcast gameplay on their channels, which means Twitch integration probably won’t mean much for the average educational developer.

“But that’s going to matter going forward,” Low said. “People are sharing more things. They like to stream. People play games professionally, both competitive and causual, and Lumberyard is aimed at serving that community. Who knows how educational games will fit into that space in 10 years?”