[GAMES] Gamer Colleges

You know what’s annoying (but not in the dumpster), people who get all psyched about those Gamer College and their commercials. Here they are, always wanting to create a game but didn’t know how and…HEY! They see on TV, a nice fancy Devry or Full Sail commercial featuring game development. All of a sudden there all hyped cause they can go to school and all they do is play games all day as a career and make em and best of all, I get free games! It has to be probably the most easiest well paid professions ever! I’m applying! … Idiot!

First off, Game Development is by far not the easiest profession ever. Sure you get your kicks by playing games almost all the time (of course that depends on the department you reside in) and you’ll make your dollar (I mean seriously, the Game Industry is a multibillion dollar industry which is beginning to rival the movie industry), but it’s not all fun and games and when you’re under the gun, everything changes.

So what the hell gives me some credibility for this? Well I’ve tried and done it though I’m no industry pro. I’ve tried 3D but did more in 2D. Long ago in high school, for kicks and fun, I was developing a free squeal to the SEGA popular classic, Streets of Rage game known as Streets of Rage 4: UEI Edition. I worked on it for about 4 years before I eventually canceled the project because I simply had no time for it, and I wanted to do something original. I have some experience in a few programming languages which would be VB, C++, and GML. Sure some of this may be wrong since I don’t have a degree in it (hey you didn’t see this on GameDev so stop nagging me lol), but if this is you, then I encourage you to not entirely take my word for it in the first place and DO YOUR RESEARCH!

Now that we’ve established that, let’s continue. Even though I worked in 2D which in general is WAY more simplistic than 3D, I was able to get a glimpse of some of the programming technicalities that you could face, and some of the basic math requirements that depending on the game you’re developing could explode in to monster mathematical formulas and concepts. Ohh so you just want to play and make games huh? Lol

One thing about it (which what turned me off to game development as far as programming) is the amount of Math you need to know. Yep don’t think that there’s some easy way around it. As a game developer, you are a programmer, therefore in order to get the effects that you want in the standard 3D space of today’s industry, great Math skills is not only required, but it’ll save your ass and keep you ahead of the competition. Here’s a simple example. Remember the game Ristar? In it, there’s a enemy who’s arm is a sequence of balls that swing around and I think was able to break apart if you hit him the right way. Anyway, though the concept of the swing arm ball connected enemy may seem simple, you have to think, how the hell am I going to create an enemy whose arm is created by balls in which all the balls have a similar pivot point, and swing around at the same time? Further I want to make it so that if I call the object 6 times from the master body code, that each ball called will inherit an +x and +y position from its predecessor. Further, each ball needs to swing with the common reference being that pivot and needs to be tracked so the balls won’t move away from their pivot at any given point and stays in line with the other balls. I would think to do this, you’d use the circumference formula with some kind of code that modifies the swing track size (the circle that you’ll be defining) in relation to the pivot with one of the modifiers being the ball current position……I told you, that’s just the simple! And to make it worse, it’s a 2D Game!





Physics are also becoming a requirement in my opinion. Don’t believe me? Let me ask you. The standard game development physics engine in today’s industry (Yes you may need to know some physics) is probably Havok (correct me if I’m wrong) which more than likely developers have to pay a license fee in order to use the resources. What if the developers no longer want to pay the high license price for the engine? Now you the game developer a.k.a. programmer must develop on top of the original game engine, a physics engine that works with all your 3D models in your new space. Ohh wait, game engine? Games don’t have motors! Well technically they do. In general, commercial 3D games do not run like normal windows applications. Doing that would make the game look very boring and if you’re talking about console games, now you have even more work considering you can no longer program your engine on top of Windows! Anyway, what is preferred is to create some sort of “sub OS” (PC Wise) whose main task is to run your game without interferences from unneeded resources from your platform and can use 3D instructions. This is your Game Engine. Sure there are third party engines available which look very nice, but it is preferred that developers create their own. That way, they don’t have to worry about another payment for code and resource licensing from a third party developer and the engine is not cluttered up with useless code that your game probably won’t use anyway. Ohh but wait, how are you going to get your models in your engine? What sound format will be accepted, how will the controls work, what engine based effects will be utilized, lighting schemes, shadow schemes, texture utilization and mapping, ect. Ect. Ect. Guess what, that’s YOUR job. YOU figure it out! So when do I get to play?! HEH :D

So now you like screw it, I’ll just get someone to do the programming for me. I aint no math wiz and still want to create a game. We’ll get into that next time >:D.