Capstone #5

Have you ever wanted to know something about a topic? Well I have to do it for a school project called capstone. And I wanted to learn more about, is video games? So I made my main inquiry question which is what your going to research about your topic. So I made mine how are video games designed and what role does technology play in designing video games? So I made my sub questions that were related to my main inquiry question. My sub questions are. What are jobs related to designing a video game? How do companies come up with an idea for the game? How are characters designed? What can you do with graphics? How has new technology affected video games?

 

The jobs related to designing a video game are. A job is a game designer, the person comes up with an idea and concept for the game and how it plays out. Then talks to the team. Then a script writer makes a bigger story for the game. Another job is the modeller. The modeller creates the visuals, objects, characters and weapons. That is important because you need someone to make all of the objects. Another job is the animator, the animator creates motion for the games based on real life movements. This is cool because they put motion detectors on people’s body and they put that with the characters they make. They also have a level designer which makes the background and what you need to do for that level. There also is a UI designer, this makes the keyboard control, mouse control and mobile. They also do the inventory, the screen, map and how a user interacts with your game. Another job is the game mechanics, they make the rules balanced for everyone. Then a programmer makes the code art and sound that fits well with the game. And the final job is the tester. The tester tests the game to make sure that everything is alright and that there is no glitches.

 

Here are some steps that companies use to get an idea for a video game. Step 1: Think of a video game you like but you are not allowed to copy it. So you know what’s expected. Step 2: Think about what shows you like and what’s good about it. Step 3: Think about books you like. After brainstorming things you like jot down ideas for your game so you don’t forget it. Step 5: Ask people what games they wouldn’t want to play to get a sense of what games people don’t like. Step 6: Find out what they would want. Step 7: Look at stuff happening in the world because you can put these things in your game. Step 8:You have to pick a theme. Some examples are magic/fantasy, drama, comedy, love, western, detective, problem, science, cartoon/animation, horror, thriller, action and adventure. This is important because you need to have a main idea for the game. Step 9: Find a genre: sports, puzzle strategy action shooter adventure simulation and RPG. After all of this you need to plan how much money are you willing to pay to make the game? Also how much do you want to make for the game and how will you make it? This sets expectations for you. You might also need to think about what kind of players will play the game bad, good or both? Is it solo, team or CPU? What console can you play it on? Can you play cross platform? A big thing is what would make people keep on playing? Mostly things like updates.

 

One of the big things in a game are the design of characters. People will also spend money on it if it is good so you need to make the characters look really good. The first step is you come up with a backstory to make the character interesting. Then you need to come up with an idea for a character. For example : can he fly, swim teleport. To make the character good at certain things. Also who would he or she fight? What weapons can her or she have. What perspective would you see the character 2D or 3D. One of the very important things are that characters are made out of polygons not circles and then they use something called texture mapping because it makes color and texture for the character to make it realistic. A lot of the time when people make monsters they draw it out characters before making it 3D. It is called storyboard. They also need to make a lot of different sketches to make a pose the character does or different emotes. One thing EA sports does for the sports players is they take pictures from every angle of their head and wrap it around another head to make them realistic.

 

One big thing in making a good video game is the graphics. The graphics include the CPU the commentary the background and the fans. For some games the commentary is made by people have lines and they talk it into the mic and gets recorded. And when something happens in the game the commentator would say the line connected to it. For example, there’s a great pass and there’s a shot and goal!! Commentary for certain things were off. For example, when someone spikes the ball it says incomplete I don’t know what the offence was doing there. One big thing is making decisions because for different monitors there is different size screens so they need to decide if they cut off apart of the screen, stretch everything or give the person more space to see. One thing is everything is made out of tiny pixels. For example a coin they make it big in big pixels then they shrink it to fit. Some tools that people use are Game Maker Studio because it’s great for 2D games. People also use Unity for 3D games. One thing technology can do to graphics for video games is ray tracing. Ray tracing makes the game more realistic like make fake water into real water and add light rays through windows like in real life.

 

New technology changes most video games a lot but what were some of changes. One change is In old video games they had to draw and draw all of the movement for walking and jumping. Now they put motion sensors on people to make the movement realistic and into a character. Another change is old was 2D and new is 3D. This was a big change in games because it added more things to do, like add more space to run in the game. New technology makes games more realistic with there fast hardware. Another change is the AI is way more realistic and it makes moves like actual players. Another thing new technology has done is great internet so you can play online games that don’t always crash. Another thing is new games are real time multiplayer unlike old games where you you go against other players high score on that device.  One of the big changes are portable devices that you can play whenever you want unlike always having to be home at your tv and you don’t need to buy another gaming console. One of the biggest changes is the CGI. The CGI is 3D and special effects making the explosions so cool.

 

Overall the things that you need to do design video games are really cool and fun to play when they’re done. I’ve learned so much about the design process of video games and technology throughout this whole project. I hope you learned something new!

 

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