UGDP - Making the Game Lesson

Making the Game Lesson

You've designed a great game, understanding the audience, genre and modes of play. Now it's time to actually make something that fits your plan! There are stages that will occur, and skilled people along the way that can make a great game happen. You could just develop a game solo, but it will need to be very simple, or just take a long time. Most games and simulations take large teams, sometimes hundreds of people, to make a game become a reality.

We've discussed the game design or "concept" stage. Game design will continue to be refined, as challenges and opportunities will arise. Within that main "design" group, you may or may not have had artists, programmers, and more. As you make the game, you definitely need them, as their work will either lead to a finished product or make you revisit the game design in some way.

As discussed earlier, an initial game design will have a working title for the game, which is a title that might be the final title of the game, but is probably going to change. It will also have some general concept art, a genre, theme and likely platforms, as well as choice of 2D, 3D, single player, multiplayer.  

The next stage is building out "assets", and the first prototypes. Assets is a general term for the images, sounds and other "things" that help to make up a game. A prototype is a simple example to demonstrate a concept, and is usually for proving whether something will work or not, before dedicating time to making a very elegant or finished product.

Let's pretend you're part of the team building SMITE.  There are many, many things to do, and these are done in parallel with each other, with a common set of deadlines to bring everything together. They need characters for players, worlds in which to play, art for marketing and promotion, audio effects, programming for game play and interaction, etc. If you want to learn how they are going to build this game well, the jobs and parallel tasks that would occur in this real Georgia game programming company are the focus of your assignment.

 

IMAGES CREATED BY GAVS