Using Game Engines Beyond Games

Game engines are usually seen as tools meant only for making games, but in practice they are often used for much more than that. This lightning talk looks at how open source game engines and game development libraries show up in real world projects beyond traditional games.

Instead of comparing engines or features, the talk focuses on a simple pattern: game development tools are very good at solving interaction heavy, real time problems, and that makes them useful in places people don’t always expect. Through a few concrete examples,The talk highlights how FOSS game dev tools is reused beyond games and why that reuse matters in practice.

The goal of this talk is to encourage people to think of game engines as general-purpose interactive systems and to explore using open source game development tools in unconventional ways.

• Game engines are not limited to games and are often reused for interactive software

• Game development tools solve a specific class of real-time and interaction heavy problems

• Exploring game tools beyond games can unlock new ways to build interactive systems