From what we do, IT projects usually begin with the understanding of the challenges to be solved in order to create a product. This then leads to determining a specification and putting all of this down on paper. Meaning, you can find out what will be done in the project easily. This is possible even on Agile projects, with the goal that formalization occurs for shorter periods. This is usually due to the fact that the customer has a poor idea of what they need.
In gaming, the situation is vastly different. The reason lies in the difficulty of formulating something fun – it’s very difficult to put into words. And even if you did, you need to think about how that fun would work with lots of people. “With our application, the user should be able to book a hotel room” and “With the help of our application, the user should have fun.”
When comparing games to cinema or theatre, there are many unknowns. Before release, it is hard to tell what kind of reaction people will have towards our game. On the other hand, games are one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. A major component of successful companies is meeting deadlines and delivering on expectations – in this regard, games are a good investment.
One top EA manager told me, “we have to be predictable” and this is the pure truth. Every day a game is late for release can cost you tens of millions in lost revenue or wasted marketing budget. Mixing incompatible elements such as the unpredictability of the outcome and its reliability can reflect in the production process.
Take a look at the graphic below to see what the production cycle looks like. IAgile development is appropriate for pre-production development, but not really suited for production.
The main principle is to start with early prototypes. Anything that raises questions should be implemented as early as possible. This reduces the cost of any errors that might happen. At the same time, the concept of “early prototyping” should be quite broad. I played a game with combat and it started to get really repetitive after the first few quests. It’s not just bad because of the lack of enemy variety, but also due to the lack of complexity in how we interact with them, feedback is set up – visual and sound effects, a HUD is made, a system of rewards is made. Early prototyping is the process of designing minimal viable products in order to determine different design iterations. It’s when you have both a beta and an alpha version of your product, and does not include soft launches.
There are many differences between working for a “regular” software company and the type of startup culture. Teams working at larger companies will usually have managers, analysts, testers, programmers and UI designers in place.
Inside the programming workshop there may be a hierarchy- architects, leading developers etc. This is all within the framework of the structure outlined above, but most teams include a significant amount of programmers. In video game development teams this will depend on what their specific needs are but many have programmers as well. A wide variety of specialists will be involved in the creation of a game, though the people that started out writing code all those years ago are still important. Sometimes they will be required to make decisions on an area that is not their expertise.
For the production of a game, you will need specialists in the following areas:
Producer or project manager, game designers, marketing team, good mathematicians for calculating balance, 2D concept artists for rendering all game elements; 3D modelers for modelling game objects and animators – 2D or 3D, depending on the chosen technology, a sound engineer or sound engineer; a technical artist – someone who brings together all of the work done by artists and modelers in the game scene and communicates with programmers or other professionals to ensure a smooth development process. Finally, there are the designers who develop complex 3D scenes and code them in-game.
For each project, these tasks can be combined, intersected or even absent altogether. But for the most part this is how these roles work together. Based on the corresponding information, we can see that programmers are not among the most common team members, constituting only 20% of the entire team on average. Additionally, it is important to know that they must be in very good mental condition. They’re all different people and they don’t always work well together. But they have some interesting things in common too – more often than not, they’re all lovely people. So in order to ensure good communication, it’s important that you find out what their difficulties are and do anything you can to accommodate them.
The way different people approach game development is motivational.
The development culture of a game is different from that of general engineering practices. Even though, one might be used to doing so in the outside world, it doesn’t work as efficiently for game developing and sometimes not even using a version control system will do.
Technology difference. The game is a complex and complex technological product. Generally – client-server.The realism and the level of detail in our games are due to tons of different factors. For example, people who create our thousands of buildings or all the miles of roads. You might also not know that DLCs and updates also contribute, so we can continue to improve the game further.
Many tech-savvy individuals may disagree with me, but I don’t think games are that great. They just don’t like it here and there isn’t any way to use “high-level” techniques. When it comes to programming languages, the most in demand area is gaming development. Other languages include things like C++ and even algorithms. The standard library and data structures are also worth mentioning.
The following is true not only for games, but for almost any product, but it becomes most obvious in games. Keeping your users interested in your game is key. If you get it right, they’ll want to spend their time and effort on your game rather than going to the movies or during work hours. That’s why a lot of developers invest so much time into finding the perfect formula for their games. In the same way, the procedures are not important, the millions of pixels in special effects concept art are not important, and it is important to develop detailed character plot twists – all these things will be served with one screen at game load. What matters is the final product, the deadline, and what you can do to make that final product better. If you constantly find yourself getting in your own way while trying to work on important projects then it might be time to consider an alternative solution.
Comments are closed