Architecture

The underlying architectural model each game engine is built around.

Unity

Historically a GameObject/Component model (objects carrying attached component scripts), with an optional, separate Entity Component System (DOTS/ECS) available for performance-critical workloads.

Unreal Engine

An Actor/Component model at its core, combined with a class hierarchy rooted in UObject, giving structured inheritance alongside composition through attachable components.

Godot

A scene-tree and node-based architecture — every game object is a node in a hierarchical tree, and scenes (reusable groups of nodes) can be nested inside other scenes.

GameMaker

An object-and-room model — game objects with events and behavior placed inside “rooms” (levels), a simpler, more 2D-game-oriented structure than a general scene graph.

Construct

An object-and-layout model similar in spirit to GameMaker, where behaviors and event sheets attached to objects define logic without an underlying general-purpose component system.

CryEngine

An Entity-Component architecture, similar in spirit to Unity’s, where entities gain functionality through attached components defined in C++ or via Flowgraph.

Cocos Creator

A scene-and-node architecture with components attached to nodes, conceptually similar to both Unity’s component model and Godot’s scene tree.

Bevy

A pure Entity Component System (ECS) from the ground up — there’s no object hierarchy or inheritance at all, just entities, data components, and systems that operate on them.

Defold

A game-object-and-component model, where lightweight game objects gain behavior through attached script components written in Lua.