WGE MAG: 47
“there has been a huge resurgence in the area of independent games over the last five years, and you should be taking advantage of this to create your own games.”
The Technology Finally, you will have to decide which technology you will use to build your game. The technology will drive many aspects of your game design. For example, if you choose Flash to create your game, then you are pretty much deciding that it will be a 2D game (though there are add-ins that allow for 3D games to be created in Flash). Unity, on the other hand, is much more suited for building 3D games than 2D games. There are way too many considerations to be dealt with on technology than we can cover in this article. The key question you should be asking at this point is, “What technologies am I or other members of my team already familiar with?” If your artists already know and have access to Maya and your programmer only knows C++, this is going to narrow down your technology choices considerably.
What Next? In future columns I will discuss each of the three core areas discussed above in greater detail. Between now and then, you should start creating your game design document, sketching out who the members of your team will be, and then finding out what technologies they are familiar with and have access to.
Until then!
• Artist – Responsible for creating the visual assets for the game. This may include 2D art and textures, 3D models, and animations used in the game as well as art needed for marketing, promotion, and a web site.
• Programmer –The person who actually writes the computer code to make the game work.
• Writer – Creates the story and dialogue for the game.
• Audio – Responsible for the music, sound effects and possibly voice-overs.
• Quality Assurance – Responsible for putting together a plan to test the game and for insuring that any bugs have been reported, tracked, and eliminated.
• Testers – Test the functionality of the game and help make sure that there are no bugs that are harmful enough to crash or otherwise derail the game.
There are certainly other roles in game development. You might even be surprised at the length of the list above. Certainly, many small indie teams will consolidate functions so that, for example, the designer is also the writer. Other teams may have multiple people covering each role. You have to adapt the list above to your team and your game, but no game will be made without covering all of the bases above, even if it is one person covering all of the bases!
Robert Madsen is a game development evangelist who also happens to run his own independent studio, SynapticSwitch. Robert is a programmer by trade. You can reach Robert at
rmadsen@iname.com.
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