Develop: Using a Game Engine to Create a Simulation

Simulations are a great method for “learning by doing” but it can be expensive to create a fully immersive simulation from scratch. One solution is to “mod” or modify an existing game engine to create a simulation. An existing game engine already has the physics and the rules of the world built in. A designer is then left to focus on the creation of objects and items in the world and not with the thousands of lines of code that must be written to create a complex virtual world. It can cut development time dramatically as opposed to coding the simulation from scratch.

Below is a screen capture of a simulation we designed for teaching bank employees how to interact with certain customers and cross-sell services. We built this "branching story" simulation on top of the Torque game engine. The Torque tool is powerful. It has been used to create many games and is starting to be used to create some amazing simulations.

Check out the Toruqe game engine at GarageGames.com.



Confession: We hired a freshman from Carnegie Mellon University to help us with the coding for the project. He did all the programming in a little under 3 months. Thanks Mike Phillips!

Content Guide