Technologies for Video Game Production
Welcome to part two of this series of blogs, where we discuss about Game Development and the technologies used for this purpose.
Video Game production requires a lot of technical skills. Audio, Video, Physics, gameplay, everything plays an important role in this aspect. In this blog, we are going to discuss about some of these skills and techniques that are used by production houses and Indie Game Developers alike, and about how to start learning one at the most basic levels.
Graphic Production
Graphics are the most important part of games nowadays, where people are asking for more and more realism to be integrated into games. A good graphical interface appeals to the end user and provides them a great experience.
Most software available nowadays support both 3D and 2D and are pretty easy to use and work with. Some major software that can be used for Graphics are -
Among these, Blender is the most widely used software among beginners because of its easy usage, comparatively low system requirements and it’s open source nature.
Resources to learn Blender -
Audio Production
Audio is and has been an important part of games. Character voices, Background music/sounds and other sound effects are introduced into the game to bring it to life. Character voices are usually recorded in a studio using professional recording equipment, while the other sounds are generally made up by artists using specialized software.
Major software that can be used to produce Audio and sounds effects for Audio Production are -
Among these, the most widely used is FL Studio, because of it’s ease to use and beginner friendly nature. Some resources for FL Studio -
Gaming Engines
Game Engines are basically software frameworks designed to develop video games using a set of specific tools. This is the place where all the magic happens. They combine everything together, and apply the code to them which synchronizes everything and produces the final output that we want to see.
Game Engines include a space for integrating “assets”(Models, images, audio, video, etc.) from foreign sources into the project along with the other parts. Engines nowadays have very high levels of functionality. They have a rendering engine to show how everything works together. Some other features include Physics engine and collision detection, animation, sound, Artificial Intelligence, networking, streaming. They can also help optimize a game and it’s usage of available resources and help in areas such as memory management, multi-threading, network management, etc.
Some popular Game Engines -
Engines are such powerful tools that many companies have built their own proprietary engines from scratch to be used for the games they develop. Some of these are as follows -
- Frostbite — Frostbite is an engine built by Electronic Arts (EA) for development of a wide variety of games. Some major examples of the games developed on Frostbite are NeedForSpeed series, FIFA 2k series, Battlefield series, etc.
- RED engine — This engine is built by the Polish video game developer CD Projekt for it’s widely successful games, such as the Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077.
- RAGE — Rockstar Advanced Gaming Engine(RAGE) is a game engine developed by a small team known as the RAGE Technology group at Rockstar Games. It has been used for creating the some of the best known titles of all time such as Grand Theft Auto V, Max Payne 3 and Red Dead Redemption.
Indie developers and learners (like us) mostly use open source engines, because of their open source and free-of-cost nature, and wide support of assets in the community.
Engines work in a way that is easy for everyone to make use of. We can import assets into our project, which can either be created by us using the technologies listed above, or can be imported as a pre-made package from the internet. All the engines have their own asset stores where people can download and upload character models, sounds, map terrains, elements, etc. which can be used by other creators either free of cost or by purchasing the asset for some amount.
These assets can then be introduced into the world of our game and can be integrated with the other elements of the project. They can be put into different frames, timelines, and matched according to the scene of the game. The magic occurs when the code is used to integrate the elements with one another and everything comes to life. The code enables the user to control the character model, and to specify how the other objects interact with each other in the world.
Games can be made in many languages - Python, JavaScript, C++ all are capable of this task. Different engines might use different languages for the same task. Unity uses C# (C sharp), and is the most popular game development tool in the community. Other engines such as Unreal use C++; CryEngine can be used with around 5 languages. But because of the popularity of Unity, C# is the most widely used language in the game development history.
There are many resources to learn about engines and get you started on game development. Some of these resources are paid(available as courses that you can buy), but we would only be discussing the ones that are available free of cost. Some of these resources are listed below -
Thank you for reading this blog article!! I hope it would prove to be useful in your quest of learning game development. Feedback is appreciated, please drop your thoughts in the comments below.
