The Game Development Process

Creating a video game also typically requires a great deal of team effort. With a degree in game design and development, you may have the opportunity to work with a team of video game experts who are just as excited about the industry as you are. Learning from them can help you do your job more effectively, thereby creating more successful games.

Video games must begin with a story. Video game designers must have an active imagination in order to create a story that is engaging and fast-paced, but not overly confusing. They must be able to speak and write in a clear, concise manner in order to express their ideas to the rest of the team working on the game.

Creating a story does not just involve an introduction, narrative plot, and conclusion. Game designers must create all sorts of characters as well. Most importantly is the player's character, the hero or heroine. This character must be interesting and the players should be able to relate to him or her. The game designer must decide on what special abilities or weapons the main character has at his or her disposal and must decide on how quickly the character's powers grow as the game progresses.

After that come the other characters in the game. These characters might be friends, enemies, monsters, space aliens, or animals. But in order for the artists to clearly render them, they must be well described. Game designers tend to create quite a bestiary as their careers grow. These non-player characters (NPCs) must also have skills and attributes of their own, and the game designer must decide how they will react to the player's character.

As the story of the game progresses, the game designers must come up with creative puzzles for the player to solve. These puzzles must be challenging enough to be fun and make the player feel as though they've accomplished something. They also must create puzzles that are at the same level as the player's character. If the puzzles are too difficult, the player will become frustrated and stop playing.

Once the characters and story are decided upon, game designers with artistic skill must render the characters and settings visually. Many tools are used to achieve this. Some things are drawn with pen and ink and scanned into a computer. Others are created with paint and canvas and also scanned in. Sculpture is a popular tool for rendering 3-D style games. Computer animation is also utilized.

Storyboards are set up by the game designers in order to illustrate to the rest of the team how the story will proceed visually. These storyboards are a visual outline of the game and act as a blueprint for the programmers and animators to follow.

Once the story and characters have been rendered visually, the computer programming begins. Game designers usually know several programming languages in order to accommodate writing code for many different game platforms. Game designers use this code in order to communicate to the computer how it is the different characters should interact with one another and with their environment.

Game designers with advanced math skills will often apply the laws of physics to their games in order to make them seem more realistic. Others will write algorithms that simulate real life situations, like driving a car or boat.

Throughout the process of the game's development, other game designers work on the sound effects, soundtrack, and voices of the game. These characters must create an interesting selection of music that conveys the appropriate mood, but doesn't distract from game play. Sound effects must be realistic without taking up too much memory and the voices must suit the characters' different personalities.

Once all of this is accomplished, the game must go through a process known as testing and debugging. This is where video game testers (many of them also game designers) play the game exhaustively in order to find and correct any flaws within the game's programming. Game testers must have good manual dexterity, as they must play the whole game through many times in order to check for every kind of bug. They look for things like characters walking through walls or levels failing to load:

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