9.2 Listening
4. At this stage, focus on the recite element of the Cornell system. Point out that here, the student has completed the Review section. Tell students to cover the Notes section, and ask them if they can say anything about the first and second questions in the Review.
Put students in pairs to test each other on the remaining notes.
46 Part 1
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to introduction to games development. I’m Ana Nowak and I am one of the team teaching this course. OK, so these lectures will give you an overview of games development. You will also have lab sessions where you will develop your own games. So, we assume that all students on this course have some prior programming experience and understand the basic concepts of programming. OK, so most of you probably grew up playing some
video games and maybe some of you will have already done some programming with graphics? Where you have shapes on screen which can be updated in different ways … excellent! So, in the talk today, I’m going to explain what you will cover on the course and give you some ideas about different sources, books, websites and videos that will be helpful to you. I want you to think about the games you grew up
playing … modern games … and I want you to think about the skills somebody needs to develop games like those. So, in those games, I’m sure there was a lot of colour and a lot of sound, lots of animation, lots of movement and lots of asynchronicity – which means lots of different things happening at the same time: sounds, colour … am I right? And, of course, the game developer also needs to
think about interactivity: how the player – or players – interact with the game, how they respond to what is happening on the display or screen they are using … that’s very important … And the structure of the game. How does it all fit together so there is some kind of logic; a narrative that makes it possible to make sense of all the different things that are happening … Some kind of story, however simple, is needed to make the game make sense to the players. So, that’s a lot of different skills and I can see that
some of you think it may be too many skills for you to learn … Well, as Greg Johnson points out in his book on developing creative content for games – don’t worry, it’s on your reading list: Developing Creative Content for Games, published in 2019 by CRC Press … He says the range of skills needed to develop games for modern game developers is so wide that no one person will have all these skills … so development will need to take place in a ‘massive team’ (to use his words). So, it is true that game developers need a lot of very different skills … but, as we will see, it is still possible for individuals to develop successful games in other genres … What we are going to talk about next is concepts and
principles which are common to all games. During the semester, you will do a lot of lab work, where you put the
theory from these classes into practice. As part of the lab work, you will do various practical assignments, starting with small projects and working towards creating your own game in whatever genre you choose. So, creating graphics – drawing shapes or drawing
text on screen – is probably the element that is most common to all games … and I understand that you will already have some experience of using graphics in your programming … So, in your first task – creating a game which is similar to the classic game of Pong – you will see for yourselves how important graphics are to even the simplest game … In Pong, you have a ball and two paddles to stop the ball from falling off the edge of the screen. It is a very simple game, in black and white, with very simple controls; the two paddles just move up and down the screen … But even though this is an extremely simple game, it was one of the very early arcade games and it was incredibly popular. Many people still really enjoy playing it and other legacy arcade games. We will look at how to manage position on the screen
and how to manage the speed graphic objects move at. We will also look at how time is used in games, especially delta time. Delta time is one of the most important variables in any game because it measures how much time has passed since the last frame of the game, so we can use that when we are managing how quickly or slowly specific actions happen. We will look at game state. This is another feature
that is common to all games. Each game can have many different states, such as when it shows the menu at the beginning of the game or when players are playing or moving to a different level. Logic is also an essential feature of games. We will
look at the logic of the game and how you show that logic on screen, depending on the state. So, for example, if a player moves a character, but there is an object in front of that character, how does the logic handle this? And, linking all these together, we will be using
object-oriented programming, which is a way of bringing together the code for each of our game objects. So, instead of having to worry about different variables for each of the objects – such as characters – by using object- oriented programming, each object can keep track of its own information, such as its position, its speed and the amount of time that has passed since it has done something. OK, so now I’ve mentioned object-oriented
programming, that brings me to the next part of my talk – resources for coding: that is writing code for games … I have a little story to tell you … when I was younger, I got a job with a games company who had just released a bestselling title. I thought I would find people who were expert at writing code and fitting all the parts of programs together, but, instead, while they were really brilliant at writing their own code, they didn’t really care too much about how things fitted together. Team leaders tried hard, but everybody was working to really tight deadlines and there never seemed to be enough time to think about how the different pieces fitted together … So, sometimes, one developer would spend a lot of time writing code which essentially did the same thing as code somebody had written a few days before. I could see that things needed to be improved, but it was many years before I was able to do something practical about it … The point
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