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PageDescribe, in no more than 1-2 sentences each, the role of the Developer, Publisher, and Distributer in the game development process.
Ans: Developer - responsible for creating the game, including design, programming, and artistic content creation. Publisher - provides financial support for the game. Responsible for manufacturing, marketing and customer support, among other things. Retailer - sells the games to the consumer
What is level design? Roughly, where does it occur in the game development process?
Ans: Level design is the process of creating levels for a game, using the implemented development tools and gameplay rules, with the intent of providing interesting gameplay. Level design occurs in the latter stages of game development when most of the game coding and content has been created.
In what ways, in terms of team size and makeup, have game development teams changed over the past 20 years? Why?
Ans: In general, game development teams have grown and increasingly include artists, designers and even producers in addition to programmers. This change has been fueled by the increase in computer capabilities that have allowed for increasing support for graphics and music, and also by the market demand for high-impact, hit-driven games.
Briefly describe why a toy is not a game. How can you make a toy into a game?
Ans: A toy is not a game because it does not provide any built-in goals. A toy can become part of a game if goals are provided by the player.
Name at least two aspects you lose when making a board game into a computer game. Name at least two aspects you gain when making a board game into a computer game.
Ans: Lose many physical aspects of the board game, such as pieces, dice and cards. Lose natural social interactions that take place during board game play. Gain AI that can handle many simple and sophisticated game bookwork tasks. Gain multimedia, including graphics and sound, that can enhance immersiveness.
What is game theory? Provide one example of how it can be used to inform gameplay or otherwise develop a game.
Ans: Game theory is a branch of economics in which a system, governed by rules of cost and payoff, is analyzed to determine the best choice to produce the maximum payoff. Game theory can be used to analyze gameplay for dominant choices or even as a basis for a computer AI.
A simple game features a knight and priest fighting a single opponent at a time. The knight fights in the front with a sword, the hunter in the back with arrows. The priest can either heal the knight or cast a bolt at the opponent. Assume the heal and bolt do the same healing/damage, respectively. If the player is manipulating the priest, why does this simple game not have interesting gameplay? Describe a way to make the gameplay more interesting.
Ans: the game is not particularly interesting since although the user has a choice (bolt or bandaid), the net affect is the same for each spell. If the game allowed varied monsters (ie- many small monsters or a monster with many arms or ...) then the decision of which spell to use would be more interesting.
What is Impermanence as a tool for ensuring interesting choices? Describe how you could use it in a first-person shooter game to make the gameplay more interesting.
Ans: Impermanence is a compensation technique for making something that is beneficial for the player not last forever. In a first-person shooter, this could mean making a grenade launcher with limited ammunition or an invulnerability shield that only lasts for 30 seconds.
What are Supporting Investments as a tool for ensuring interesting choices? Describe how you could use them in a real-time strategy game to make the gameplay more interesting.
Ans: Supporting investments support a secondary goal towards the game objective. In a real-time strategy game, a primary goal could be defeating an enemy and a supporting investment could be armor so the soldiers (that can defeat the enemy) are tougher.
What is "positive feedback" for a synergistic game relationship? Provide an example.
Ans: a synergistic relationship is one in which multiples of some item or items is not additive. "Positive feedback" is a synergistic relationship where 2+ items are better than the sum of each item. An example would be two soldiers that can guard each others back, thus having better armor than either alone.
What are key frames in animation?
Ans: Key frames are the images of a moving object at the extremes of movement. For example, for a duck flying, this could be when the wings are down and up.
When creating an artistic scene, it is often useful to use "broad strokes" in the creation process. What does this mean?
Ans: "Broad strokes" means coarsely capturing the scope or motif of an artistic endeavor before filling in the details. For example, in creating a 3d model of a house, the first broad strokes could involve creating a flat plane for a yard, using some simple polygons to represent the house and adding basic colors as textures, thus providing an initial "feel" for how the scene may work.
What is a reference as it relates to visual design and production for games?
Ans: A reference is a picture of a real-world object that can be used as an example to make a digital representation of the object. The reference can help with proportions, colors and textures. For example, modeling and rendering sofa would be much easier with a picture of a real couch as a reference in order to get the arms proportioned right and the fabric right.
What do we refer to when we talk about using "broad strokes" for artistic rendering? Provide an example.
Ans: Broad strokes refers to doing the most visually outstanding parts of a work first and then filling in the details later. For example, broad strokes of an (outdoor) house would first put in a basic cube house with cylindrical trees to get proportions right. Then, simple textures or colors (green for the trees, brown for the ground) would be added to get a "feel" for the scene before adding further details.
What are some of the differences between NURBS and Polygonal modeling?
Ans: NURBS uses curved surfaces based on a few points, while polygonal modeling uses points for vertices with edges between them. Polygonal surfaces are straight-forward and easy to render but are manually intensive to create. NURBS are resolution independent but have seems difficult to overcome. (There are more details that can be provided here.)
What are faces, normals and backface culling as they related to polygonal modeling?
Ans: A face is the flat size of a polygon. A normal is a vector at a right angle to the face. Backface culling is the process of removing polygons that are not rendered on a screen.
Briefly describe some ways to effectively reduce the polygon count, with examples where appropriate. Why might you want to do this?
Ans: Use backface culling to remove faces that cannot be seen (ex - remove the bottom polygon on a barrel that can't be moved). Reduce some of the polygons used to make a curved surface (ex - render the barrel sides with 12 polygons instead of 20). Being able to remove polygons that do not affect the image scene quality (much) is important to reduce the size of a game image and make it faster to render.
What is box modeling?
Ans: Modeling a basic shape as a box (or other primitive polygon) and using extrude and cut and edit to achieve a model of the shape desired.
What is a texture and how does it relate to a shader?
Ans: A shader defines the surface property of an object (ie- how shiny, bumpy, how light effects it). A texture is a bitmap that is plugged into shader that defines image we want to appear on object (ie- such as a picture of letters on an otherwise flat sign).
What is an alpha channel?
Ans: A gray-scale image embedded in the "extra" 8 bits of 32-bit image, and used in graphics rendering for transparency, reflection and bump maps.
Provide some brief examples of how lighting can be used to influence mood.
Ans: Color can be used to indicate mood. For example, a green wash can indicate peace for the player while a red wash can indicate warning. Lighting can indicate mood, with shadows providing mystery or warning.
What is a key light? What is a fill light? What kind of light would you use to make "pools of light" in a scene?
Ans: A key light is the main light source, the most intense and the majority. It's put at angle to define 3-D forms. A fill light brings out some details out of shadow and works well at angle. A backlight is placed behind and slightly above or below object to help define shape. It highlights edges, pulls away from background. To make a pool of light, an artist would probably use spot lights with focused beam on single location since they provide great control over the lighting.
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