A Glimpse Inside Game Creation

Posted on: April 2, 2020

Game Design is a blanket term that covers a wide variety of roles and functions in the gaming industry. Whether you are a general designer, producer, animator, game composer or audio designer, Taylor and Francis has you covered with our wide variety of Gaming titles which you can view here. 

Take a peak inside some of our top gaming titles with our Strategy Guide for Game Creation FreeBook V.2. Our FreeBook provides valuable insight into game creation and:

• Provides an understanding of the role of a game designer.
• Supplies the basics of visual art to be better able to create a texture set for a game world.
• Identifies elements essential to create great game animation and groups under five fundamental areas.
• Gives a complete picture of the entire gamut of components that make up a modern game engine.
• Presents principal 3D concepts.
• Outlines the basics of quick sketching to depict plainly what is going on, the who, what, when, where, why, and how.

Strategy Guide for Game Creation

Check out a more complete overview of the FreeBook below and download it here.

The Role of the Game Designer 

From Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton - check out the book and purchase it here. What does it take to be a game designer? What kinds of talents and skills do you need? What will be expected of you during the process? And what is the best method of designing for a game? In this chapter from Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop, you’ll find the answers to these questions and outline a method of iterative design that designers can use to judge the success of gameplay against their goals for the player experience throughout the design and development process.

The Basics of Art

From 3D Game Textures by Luke Ahearn – check out the book and purchase here. Creating art for computer games requires both artistic and technical skills. The chapter from Luke Ahearn’s 3D Game Textures look at both but first we will look at the very basics of art. The goal of this chapter isn’t to turn you into an artist, but it will help you create better textures to understand these fundamentals. If you have any art training, this may be material you will want to skim over. If you don’t, hopefully it will help point you in the right direction to learn what you need to in order to become a great game artist.

The Five Fundamentals of Game Animation

 In this chapter from Jonathan Cooper’s Game Anim, which you can purchase here, you will be introduced to the five fundamentals of great game animation: Feel, Fluidity, Readability Context and Elegance. These fundamentals are what Cooper has come to know as the core tenets of our new nonlinear entertainment medium, which, when taken into consideration, form the basis of video game characters that not only look good, but feel good under player control.

Introduction to Game Engine Architecture 

From Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory – check out the book and purchase here. This chapter will give you a glimpse into Jason Gregory’s Game Engine Architecture wherein you can learn: In this book you will learn: how real industrial-strength production game engines are architected; how game development teams are organized and work in the real world; which major subsystems and design patterns appear again and again in virtually every game engine; the typical requirements for each major subsystem; which subsystems are genre- or game-agnostic, and which ones are typically designed explicitly for a specific genre or game; and where the engine normally ends and the game begins.

3D Concepts

This chapter from Luke Ahearn’s 3D Game Environments, which can be viewed and purchased here, is an introduction to the concepts of three-dimensional (3D) modeling you will most likely be working with. Once you understand these concepts, you can more easily use the tools at your disposal to create the art you want to. For the details on how to do any of the specific functions for any given 3D application, you need to consult the documentation for that application. The good news is that, as game artists, you work in both two dimensional (2D) and 3D, but at a pretty basic level of functionality, so that you can easily achieve these results in virtually any 3D package.

The Basics

From Quick Sketching with Ron Husband - check out the Second Edition and purchase here. Quick sketches should depict plainly and without question what is going on, the who, what, when, where, why, and how. It may not necessarily answer the when or where, but one look should tell you who (male, female, young, or old), what the captured subject is doing, and how it’s being done. This practice has led to my lifelong love affair with quick sketching. Learn more about the basics and more from Ron Husband by downloading our FreeBook!