Here's how I evaluate game engines: - First, will my target audience be able to play it? May seem obvious but I've seen people fall in love with an engine for

Here's how I evaluate game engines: - First, will my target audience be able to play it? May seem obvious but I've seen people fall in love with an engine for technical or business reasons and overlook this. - Choose a few hypothetical tasks (e.g. I want to add a laser beam effect, or I want a character with dual-wield weapons). Look at the docs and see if I can figure out roughly how to do this. For me, browsing docs doesn't tell me that much unless you have a particular problem in mind. At this point I still haven't even downloaded the engine yet. - Play some other games written with the engine. If there's no games using it yet, I'm cautious about being someone's beta tester. - Ok, now take a weekend or so and try to develop a mini-game with it. That's the only way to really get a good sense of what working with the engine is like.