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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
So, a lot of the time when I hear about why people want to become game developers or designers, their main comment tends to be along the lines of "All I do is play games and make games". The "All" being the main problem. It's great that games are your passion and obviously you'll need that to be a good game developer. However, I think if you limit it yourself and your creative consumption purely to games, all you'll end up doing rehashing the games you've played in your own development. I think some of the best games come from people who expose themselves to a much wider range of creative and even technical mediums. What we make is the result of our experiences and inspirations. So, it stands to reason, a limited range of experiences and inspirations leads to a limited game. Whereas if you expose yourself to other mediums such as books, movies, music, art and so on, you widen the scope of your creative experiences and inspirations. Sure playing other games is important for getting ideas mechanically for a game but, if you want to make something different rather than making slightly different types of games than what you are already playing, you need to expose yourself to everything creative. I think it's very rare that something is ever truly original. Creatives borrow and what I mean by this is, when we create something we're going to pull from our own experiences and inspirations in order to create something that has our own mark on it. Again this comes down to how much you expose yourself to other mediums. If all you know is games, you have far less to be inspired by or "borrow" from. The wider the range of inspirations, the more you will borrow. Now, I know that saying creatives borrow can be a term most don't like as it implies a lack of originality. But, take a look at your favorite game, movie, book or whatever and think about it carefully for a moment. What do you think the creators inspirations were? Did they pluck it all purely from their mind with no inspiration? Possibly in some rare cases but unlikely. We're all inspired by works that have come before us and the only way to make anything worthwhile is to expose ourselves to as much inspiration as possible. So if you say to me that you have a passion for games and want to be a game developer, I say great! But,be more than games. Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! When it comes to playing a game, we all know there's nothing worse than a game with poor performance. The last thing you want is a sudden frame rate of 10fps to break the immersion of the game. So, when it comes to making your own game, optimisation should be top of your list when it comes to building it for various systems. I'm going to go through five tips that will help to improve the overall performance of your game and keep that frame rate up. Tip #1 Reduce Poly CountThe first tip comes down to simple good work ethic when modeling your assets. It goes without saying that the fewer polys your models have, the better they are for performance. But what do you do when your model requires a lot of detail? Start off by making your base mesh and then creating the high poly version in your software package of choice. Once you have that high poly version, you can use a tool such as Maya to perform retopology on your model. In basic terms, retopology works by laying down a low poly mesh over your high poly mesh allowing you to bake the details from the high poly to the low poly. This will reduce your models poly count while still retaining a high level of detail. Tip #2 A Picture Says A Thousand WordsWith so many models in our game, we also have a lot of textures. If you create a texture atlas, you'll save on the number of draw calls which will in turn save on performance. A texture atlas is basically nothing more than a larger image that has all your models textures in it and the now all share the same UV island. You can set up a texture atlas using most modeling tools and even some third party Unity tools. Tip #3 Out Of Site. Out Of MindModels are obviously a drain on performance when they are on screen.They are also a drain when they are off camera. So why on earth would we want models that aren't even in view to be using resources? We don't! We can use the likes of occlusion culling to disable the renderers of objects that are outside of the cameras view. Basically, if it's not in sight, don't render it. Tip #4 Use LODsIt's one thing to not render something if it's not in view but what do you do if you can still see a model but it's very far away? There's no point in having a high poly detailed model rendering in the distance if we can't see any of that detail. We can use level of detail (LOD) meshes to produce various meshes that range from low poly to high poly depending on the distance the camera is from the object. So say we are very far away from a character model. We would have a low poly mesh appear as we can't make out detail, all we need to see is the very basic model. As we get closer, the mesh can change to another mesh of higher detail depending on our distance to the character. This way we can avoid wasting performance on details that can't even be seen. Tip #5 bake LightingLighting is a very important element of games. We use it so much to set the tone an atmosphere of certain scenes. But, if you're using a lot of lights, that can become a huge drain on resources very quickly. Think very carefully about the lighting you are using.Does every light need to be using realtime rendering? If not, you can bake the lighting detail of all lights that will not move. This will basically bake a snapshot of the lighting detail to a single txsture and make a huge saving on performance. Until next time! Hey Gamers and Game Makers! In this week's blog, I'm going to be talking you through five tips to help you refine your game idea. When we first get an idea for a game, our minds can be all over the place with ideas for design, mechanics, art, sound and more. It can be very hard to get a handle on the overall idea and keep track of what exactly it is you have in mind. For me, I use a few simple tricks that help me better layout my games idea and refine it into a core game idea that I can then begin building on. Tip #1 Brain Dump When you get that first spark of an idea fora new game, your mind is soon to be swimming with countless thoughts about the game and what it could be. Keeping all these ideas in your head is just not practical. The best thing to do is to get all the ideas and thoughts out of your head. Just start writing them down on paper or in a digital document. It's also best to keep this organized in some way. Use folders or headings. This way you can quickly sort through and update ideas as they change over time. The main objective with this is to get all our ideas out and recorded so it frees up your mind allowing you to form more structured ideas based on what you've already dumped. Tip #2 Make Note Of Key IdeasAs your dumping all your ideas or later on, you'll likely have those moments when a great or key idea for the game hits you. Take note of these ideas by jotting them down be it on paper or on your phone or whatever is at hand.You can then later add this idea to your brain dump folder and see how this new key idea changes the overall game idea. Tip #3 Find the Root Of Your InspirationNo matter how creative or new an idea feels, what we make is a product of our own experiences and inspirations. Look at your idea and try to identify what the inspiration behind it is. If it's a game or games, you can look at what you liked and disliked about those games. If you can identify what worked for that game and what didn't work, that information can be valuable to you when improving your own idea. Tip #4 Sit On It That original burst of ideas you have tend to be quite raw and are likely going to change quite a lot or evolve in some way. Rushing into any kind of actual development at this point would do more harm than good to your game. So, just sit on the idea for a while. Be it a few days or a couple of weeks. You'll find that if you just sit on an idea for a while, it tends to form a much better structure in your head. Not having to force yourself to think about it all the time is funny enough the best time for ideas to come. Tip #5 Make The Hard Cuts The idea stage of a game is always the most fun but it can create more problems down the line if you don't learn what ideas you should cut. Look closely at all of your brain dump ideas after a few days. You should be able to see more clearly what at the time you thought was a perfect game mechanic or design may not be as great as you thought and doesn't really benefit the games core design. The more willing you are to kill your babies at this stage, the better your games scope will be. Keeping a realistic scope to your game is key!
Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
In this week's blog, I'm going to talk a little bit about basic task management when it comes to making your game. Games take time to make and involve a lot of work. If like me, you're a one person studio, you know there's a lot to juggle between design, code, art, sound and more. It can be daunting at times trying to juggle everything or even to keep track of what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. So, how do you effectively handle task management? Well, there are a bunch of methods to it but I'm going to talk about what I do as it's a basic method that while simple, is effective. My approach is essentially a scrum method. At all stages of development for a game I'm working on from pre-production up until final development, I start by identifying what needs to be done and set goals. Saw for example you want to make a game in a year. Then your first goal and overall goal is to have a finished game within twelve months. So, next thing you want to do is break that one big goal down into monthly goals. So lets say you want to have a playable prototype at the end of the first month to test the gameplay of the game. Then that's your monthly sprint. However, to achieve that, you're going to need to break that down into smaller weekly sprints. For this example the first weeks sprint could be do build the character controller and the second weeks sprint could be to work on the camera system and so on. You can then break each of those weekly sprints down into daily tasks as well. This is what I do to keep track of what I need to do and when. I can prioritise tasks more effectively this way as I can better judge how long something is likely to take. This also keeps a sense of order and control over your game. Since games require so much work, it can be easy to loose track of what you actually need to be working on and become frustrated with the project as a whole. There are plenty of apps and services out there that can help you with the task management of your project and some of them are very could. Depending on your project, one may be better suited to you than another so, be sure to do your research. I'm somewhat old fashioned when it comes to this. I don't tend to use and app or software for my task management. As I'm a one person studio, I have no real need. I instead use a whiteboard and post-its. My whiteboard is broken down into my overall goals, my monthly goals, my weekly sprints and daily tasks. It's easy for me to quickly look at the board and see what needs to be done and it's also a great visual feeling of satisfaction as you see progress being made every time you can remove a task from the board. This is my simple approach to task management with games and there are plenty of variations that may suit depending on your project. I think this one is a good starting point as it's an effective way of quickly getting your project in order right from the start and can help you plan long term. You can then adapt it to suit your needs. Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
I recently decided to take an idea for a game that I've been sitting on for a very long time and start to actually develop it. It's a long project that is going to take a couple of years to actually make. Since this project is much larger than my past games and because visually, I want it to stand out, I decided the only way to do it justice was to use an improved workflow for my asset creation. For the longest time, I've used Blender for my 3D models when needed. Using the built in texture painter to set a base texture and then using photoshop to touch up the textures. I also use photoshop mainly for my 2D asset creation and will continue to use that for my 2D projects as it suits best. So, for the new project, I knew I needed to take a step outside my comfort zone in order to achieve the look I have in mind for the game. My new basic workflow involves four new tools to produce my 3D assets. I'm first modeling a base mesh in Maya 2018. Although at this point, I'm still weighing up the pros and cons of Maya and Blender as Blender is a fantastic tool for this and it's free. I'm liking some of the export features in Maya but unless I notice a significant improvement in Maya over Blender, I may just revert to Blender as my go to tool for knocking out a base mesh. Anyway, I use Maya to create the base mesh of whatever I'm modeling. I keep it as low poly as possible, just getting the shape and basic details correct. I also do my UV unwrapping at this point. I then export the file and open it in Zbrush. Zbrush is a fantastic 3D modeling package that focuses on sculpting. With my base mesh imported, I subdevide the model adding more polys and now I start to sculpt in the finer details. The result is a much more detailed model but the problem here is that now, the model is very high poly and unusable in the game engine. My next step is to bring my model from Zbrush and open it in 3D Coat. Here, I'll make use of 3D Coats retopology in order to produce a low poly model from the very high poly model that still retains the details I added in Zbrush. Once I'm happy with the model, it's time to texture it. For texturing, I use Substance Painter. It allows me to import my model and paint directly onto it as well as using smart materials to get better results. It also has a layer system similar to photoshop. This allows me to paint various details on different layers and not have to worry about ruining the whole texture if I decide to change a certain detail later. While the workflow is longer than before, it's so far proven to yield far more impressive assets. I still have much to learn about these tools before I'm confident in using them but, with only a little over a week of playing with them, they've been easy to get to grips with and are making the design process much easier. The game in question is in the pre-production stage and it'll be a long time before I have anything to show but, keep an eye out. Until next time! |
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