Wyatt's Gaming Research, Reviews and Design: October 2015

Thursday 29 October 2015

Assignment 1: Key Aspects for a Games Development

Course: BTEC L3 Games Development

Start Date: 10/09/15

End Date: 29/10/15

Tutor: James, Tedder

Name: Wyatt, Chapman
Assignment 1 - Key Aspects for a Games development

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Software

Unity Engine – Unity is a games development kit that is used to make 3D and 2D games. This can also be used to build up a business or create good content.

Minimum requirements:

Game requirements

Desktop:

· OS: Windows XP+, Mac OS X 10.7+, Ubuntu 12.04+, SteamOS+ - £7.99 for windows XP

· Graphics card: DX9 (shader model 2.0) capabilities; generally everything made since 2004 should work. - £21.90 - £96.62

· CPU: SSE2 instruction set support.

· Web player supports IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and others.

· IOS: requires iOS 6.0 or later.

· Android: OS 2.3.1 or later; ARMv7 (Cortex) CPU or Atom CPU; OpenGL ES 2.0 or later.

Developing the game requirements

· OS: Windows XP SP2+, 7 SP1+, 8, 10; Mac OS X 10.8+.

· GPU: Graphics card with DX9 (shader model 2.0) capabilities. Anything made since 2004 should work.

Cost – The Unity kit costs £75 a month if you have the professional edition, but there is a personal edition, which is free.

UDK (Unreal Development Kit) – The Unreal Engine 3 is a free game making software, which remains available for people still doing projects on UE3.

Minimum requirements for UDK:

· Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or Windows 7

· 2.0+ GHz processor

· 2 GB system RAM

· SM3-compatible video card

· 3 GB free hard drive space

Maya – Maya is a 3D animation, modelling, simulation and rendering software which is mainly used by artists/Game Designers.

Minimum requirements for Maya:

· Microsoft® Windows® 7 (SP1), Windows® 8 and Windows® 8.1 Professional operating system - £39.95 for 8.1 professional

· Apple® Mac OS® X 10.8.5 and 10.9.x operating system

· Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 6.2 WS operating system - £5,944.90 for the red hat

· Fedora™ 14 Linux operating system

· CentOS 6.2 Linux operating system

· 64-bit Intel® or AMD® multi-core processor - £114.01 for the AMD multi-core

· RAM 4 GB of RAM (8GB recommended) - £25.31

· Disk Space 4GB of free disk space for install

· Pointing Device Three-button mouse

Requirement costs:

Cost – Maya is a free modelling and animation toolkit.

Personnel:

Animator - Animators bring life to a game. They are in charge of controlling how the characters move, how they interact with the world and the NPCs around them, an animator you will need to understand the timing and appearance of human and animal movement and facial expressions, and be able to lip sync, they must know how to make emotions through the characters movements and have knowledge of programming.

Game Programmers - Programmers are the core of a game; even though every member of the team is important, programmers are the arms and legs. They have to code the game, so that the character can move, so events will start etc. Game programmers need knowledge in C++ and other program languages, along with having good problem solving skills.

Games Artist - I'm sure most of us know about what this job entails, they create how the game looks by creating building, vehicles, characters, surface textures etc. Games artists are the bread an butter for a game, without them the game would have no textures, it would just be a horrible pink and black checkered pattern on every object and character. To obtain this role you must be able to draw from life; convey facial expressions and emotions; imaginative and creative and have strong observational skills.

Audio Engineer - Audio engineers are the people that create each little sound within the game, from wind blowing a leaf, explosions being detonated, character voices, to ambient sounds and with each little sound, changes the atmosphere of the game. if you're interested in the role you will have to be able to compose and perform music; posses aural skills and a sense of timing; have a feel for the atmosphere of the game and have knowledge of tools and technology that help with assisting you in the creation of sounds.

Creative Director - The role itself is fairly new, but as creative director you must see to the quality and feel of the game, ensuring that artwork, music and audio assets that make up the final product. to achieve the role you must be able to inspire artist, programmers, producers and marketing staff the to the peak of their ability; make tough decisions that effect the schedule and budget if the game; understand the bigger image of development; posses imagination, creativity and problem solving skills and have a good understanding of financial and managerial aspects of the games development.

External Producer - Working away from the publishing team they ensure that the game is commercially successful. They handle the co-ordination of releasing screenshots and demo disks with the marketing manager, while also handling outsourcing of audio, cut-scenes or language localisation with the developer's internal producer and running tests on the early stages of the game. To acquire this role you must be able to handle multiple projects at the same time; have good project management skills, including scheduling, budget and risk management and be able to manage people, time and resources.

What i am currently working on

While creating my game there are alot of problems and i have to solve them all by myself. Being able to create a game without assistance means you must have experience in all roles, coding, designing, animating, you must be equally adept at all of them. Of-course there will be a certain role that you excel at more than others and for me that would probably be designing.

At the moment i am currently juggling two games. One of them is a simple maze form of game where you will have to solve puzzles, by hitting switches to get through locked doors, and with each level being completed the harder the game gets. The second game is a 2D side-scrolling platformer where the character "Bob" must go and save his burger shop from turmoil, when a crew of explosive experts attempt to destroy it.

Hardware:

Computers – A computer is a console/device, which can be used to access certain items, such as: films, games, internet, shopping etc. They are also used to store information/data.

Peripherals – Peripherals are used to import or export data to or from a device. An example of input items would be your keyboard and mouse, while if you were to export data you would use a printer or monitor.

Dev Kits – Dev Kits or SDK are used to create applications for different software packages, like; software framework, hardware platforms, computers or game console.

Publishing:

Steam Greenlight – Steam Greenlight is a brilliant idea, which allows the public to browse through a variety of games and then rate them. The highest rated games then have a chance to be transferred to steam’s market place, for the steam audience to buy.

PSN (PlayStation Network) – This is a program that was made by Sony as an entertainment service that can be downloaded on smartphones, tablets, games consoles etc.

IOS - ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is an independent, non-governmental membership organization and a developer of voluntary International Standards.

Android – Android is a mobile operating system that was made by Google. It’s mostly installed on smartphones and tablets.

ID@Xbox – This program allows qualified game developers to self-publish games on Xbox One.

Self-Finance – Self-financing is when an organization has enough money to fund for itself. A pros of this is that it require no approval for your money and is the quickest way to secure money. The cons are that you may have limited resources, this can reduce the size of the business and you may not have the skills, knowledge and experience to be successful.

Indie Funding – this is independent developers creating small games and making money off of them. One of the advantages of this is that the developer can create almost any game they want (if they have the skill), the disadvantages of being a sole developer or a small company is that not many people know of you, so your games don’t get a lot of attention. A project named indie fund helps these small developers to become the next generation of game developers.

Crowd Funding – a project to raise money by getting a lot of people to donate small amounts of money within a long period of time. (Usually over the internet).

Grants – Unreal Dev Grants is a project to help developers using unreal engine to fund for their early stage of the game by donating up to $50,000. https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/new-round-of-unreal-dev-grants-fund-education

Publisher – a publisher is the company making the game and selling it. So EA made battlefield 4 and sold it to millions of people, but they sold it earlier than they wanted to and consumers were given a broken game, causing people to be dissatisfied with the product and company, this is bad publishing. Giving a game a deadline can put a lot of stress on staff especially when people are expecting a game that tops the last one.

Time Constraints:

Deadlines – A deadline is a set date where you must complete your task and hand it in, on a specific date. If you don’t then there is usually a punishment/penalty. If you miss a lot of deadlines this can lead to you being fired.

Availability of Equipment – This is how much the developers can afford to buy. They may need 30 monitors, but they may not be able to afford it, so the game will have a later release due to lack of equipment, developers will have to test their game, this can prove to be difficult if the computers don’t have high end, CPUs, GPUs etc.

Availability of Personnel – To make a game you require skilled applicants, but getting the people needed for the specific task is harder than expected. The company has to think about the wages of the staff, how qualified they are, how many staff they need on one task, voice actors, game designs, programmers; all of the people within the categories have to be skilled at what they do.

Timescales for Clearances – How long it will take to get the game to be official, how long it will take for the game to be reviewed and given an age limit, reviews from “judges” to decide the rating of the game, and for the developers to decide if the game will have any delays to extend the development to fix any bugs, this would increase the date for it to be released.

Tuesday 27 October 2015

Steps and Ethical points about Games

Stimulus:

What is a brief? A brief contains the data that a client has prepared for the employee to follow, when asked to create a film, game etc.

Client Brief - A client brief is given to the employee, informing them about what the client wants within the game, as an example the folder would contain information about the genre, device it would be made for, how many levels and how many characters are made.

Own Brief - An own brief is data that the employee makes for themselves. if the client brief doesn't inform the developers about how many characters, levels etc. then the developer has more freedom to be creative. They are able to create as many levels as they like and as many characters because an own brief is a brief made by the employee.

Market Research - This is when the employee goes onto the internet to search for ideas, information, inspiration and consumers are interested in. Research isn't just limited to the internet though because developers can create surveys and hand them out to get feedback within a the local area.

Ideas Generation:

Brainstorming - When brainstorming a developer will write down all the ideas that he/she has either gathered from inspiration or thought of on their own and list them on a piece of paper or within any other form such as word, power point etc. After, they will pick out the best ideas and combine them together. (if possible)

Mood Board - A mood board is a brief form of story that shows images of what the developer envisions the game to be, that is accompanied by text, explaining what is happening within the segment. This is to give an idea of the feel of the game, and how it may play.

Thumbnail Sketching - Thumbnail sketches are used to go through several ideas quickly. In a sense they are closely related doodles.

Concept Art - Concept art shows the stages of a project. It'll go through the cycle of the character, weapon and scenery. At the end stage, the art piece should be finished but it doesn't have to be put into the game because the created item/person is still only a suggestion.

Legal and Ethical Consideration:

Copyright - When making a game copyrighting the logo, title etc. are essential. If you don't Trade Mark or copyright it then people can steal the name, logo and idea of the game, leaving you with nothing, so it's best to make sure that everything is copyrighted to prevent theft.

Libel - When someone is found to be libel it means that they intentionally tarnished or slandered someone's reputation.

How female characters represented within video games - Almost in every game women are categorized as sexual objects. Most developers create them with a scarce amount of clothing, leaving a rather revealing attire, followed by overly enlarged body parts. An example of this would be the old Lara Croft games.

Sunday 4 October 2015

Assignment 1: Understanding Digital Graphics used within Computer Games

Course: BTEC L3 Games Development

Unit 78 – Computer Games Graphics

Start Date: 28/09/15

End Date: 05/10/15

Tutor: Josh, Rai

Name: Wyatt, Chapman

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Assessment 1: Understanding Digital Graphics used within Computer Games

Within this assignment I am going to discuss, compare, and review different types of games, from 2D to 3D.

The 2D game I have chosen to review is Mark of the Ninja, a 2D side-scrolling, platformer. All games that are 2-Dimensional have 2D sprites. A sprite is an object, scenery or character.

Mark of the Ninja is about a man that becomes engulfed in the pride and honour of his clan, but also becomes corrupt from the power that resides in the Jade Flower. By mixing water with the crushed flower, the clan can then harness incredible abilities, which have helped them to advance through the ages. Only recently the Jade Flowers have started to wither, so the clan leader resorts to new ways for the clan, but someone doesn’t agree with the choice.

The aim of the game is to get through each level using stealth as the key factor. You can choose to get through all levels without killing anyone, which provides you with more points, or you can go through the levels silently killing everyone. You want to avoid all light if possible and use tools to distract the enemy away from your line of path. Moving along the in the game you start to learn about the secret of your clan leaders choice.

I believe this game uses a cel shading artistic style, although it’s not clear because of all the dark (mostly black) colours, but when the character enters the light we can see quite clearly, the black outline around the characters and very cartoonish style. The game encourages stealth by making anything within a shadow black. Once your character is next to a wall, or crouches on the floor in the dark, he blends in really well, but when you’re in the light we see the colours of the character indicating that you have been exposed.

Even though this is a 2D game, it doesn’t have the pixilated style, which most platformers are associated to have. The characters are smooth and well designed, along with the animations being fluent. To compensate for the dark, gloomy look that the game has. The developers/games designers have created a beautiful background, with city lights that pierce through the negative appearance of the main platforms of the level.

The in-game interface is very simple and only consist of a health system, score, tools and a few indications of the controls at the top right.

Mark of the Ninja doesn’t have any obvious texture art. Most of it is just black colouring, but there are 3D textures, such as, bricks sticking out from walls.

Planning your character's looks and animations is extremely important, and by doing it step-by-step you have space to make any improvements on the next stage of the picture. This gives the developers some ideas on how they want the character’s design to be like. Just because they drew the character, object etc. out does not mean it will be in the final publish of the game.

The 3D game I have chosen to review is Skyrim. Skyrim is a 3D RPG. (Role Playing Game)

Skyrim tells a tale about a prisoner, which is given an opportunity to redeem themselves.

Within the land of Tamriel, there was a war between humans and dragons. The dragons were gods among humans, but that didn’t stop the rebellion. After decades of slavery and slaughter, three brave heroes, which wielded the power of the voice, sealed away Alduin, lord of the dragons, within a time loop. This could only delay Alduin’s return.

On the day of the prisoner’s execution, Alduin had returned. Coincidently, Alduin appeared before the execution, your execution. This created chaos, panic, desperation and your means of escape. After escaping it becomes your job to defeat Alduin and his rising army of dragons. You must master the power of the voice and become “dragon born”.

Although Skyrim is a fantasy game, the artistic style focuses around photorealism. A lot of the colours are dark and gloomy creating a negative atmosphere. (Depending on the season) For example, in autumn, the trees are “dying”, losing their beauty, with every leaf that falls and fog gathers, dimming the light, lowering saturation and vibrancy. Summer changes that atmosphere dramatically though; light becomes more vibrant, the grass, trees, the landscape in general are more saturated, the shadows become far clearer and help to add to the beauty of the game, by having the light beam through the tree’s leaves, and wild life appears majestic.

The in-game interface within Skyrim is quite bare, it consists of a stamina meter on the bottom left, a health bar in the middle and a magic (magicka) meter on the bottom left. Also, we can see the enemy’s health bar, and a navigation bar at the top of the screen.

In terms of background scenery, there isn’t really any. Skyrim uses tall mountains (which are not accessible to climb) to block off the area that has only a white, black or transparent plain. While on the subject of mountains, let’s talk about textures.

In this image we can see that it is a 2D texture, but that is hard to notice because the developers made the model with parts that stick out and put a few 3D rocks to add the feel that the texture is actually 3D. In-fact most of the textures within Skyrim are 2D. From the ground, grass, walls etc. the grass is a little less noticeable because of the small patches of 3D grass, bushes and trees, that steer your view away from the plain texture. Of-course the PC version of Skyrim can help to fix this by installing mods that create true 3D models of grass, or you can get 4k textures of trees and other objects to make it considerable harder to see through the 2D trick.

These are just two examples of the concept art created by talented developers. On the top we see a beautifully designed idea of a dungeon within Skyrim, and at the bottom we see an incredible amount of detail put into a design of Markarth. (One of the major cities) both of them have a an amazing amount of detail put into them, but you must remember that even though a lot of time and effort was put into these, they are still only ideas and can be thrown aside later on for a better design.

Both Mark of the Ninja and Skyrim are completely separate games. Skyrim is about exploration and freedom. Creating your own path, while still following what you must do. Unlike Mark of the Ninja, the stealth system in Skyrim is quite lacklustre.

While Skyrim uses a fantasy, RP setting, where you discover mysterious creatures, places, people and have multiple options of how you go about that. Mark of the Ninja is more of a platformer merged with an action-adventure because on the platformer side of the game you can only really go two ways, and that’s left and right across the screen. Usually right being backwards and left being the path where you progress. While on the action-adventure side if you want to stealth kill someone with your sword you must enter a quick time event, and then press the appropriate buttons, within a time frame. Do this incorrectly and it can devastating consequences.

In Mark of the Ninja there is no freedom, and you have no obligation to change how you progress through the story. Yes. You can be stealthier, by not killing anyone, or can you do the opposite and go on a riot. Either way you cannot become a vampire, criminal etc. Mark of the Ninja doesn’t have a levelling system, and you can only buy new equipment and upgrade that.

The art styles are even further apart. Skyrim using photorealistic to try and produce a new reality, instead of using photorealism to copy from the real world. Mark of the Ninja uses cel shading, a very cartoonish art style. The good thing about a cartoon styled game is that it requires less processing power than if you were to make an extremely detailed world.