by Tabby | Jan 20, 2013 | Design/Development, Featured |
I want to break down game development from a specifically programming perspective. So, let’s talk about this thing we’ve been kicking around the office, which we’re calling “The Game Triforce.” The Game Triforce consists of three distinct parts: Control, Display and Timekeeping. Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad Control Control is probably the easiest component to understand. It represents all of the inputs to your system. Controls require an interface (called a human-computer interface) which is how you, the player, communicate with the box that holds the game program. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of inputs: button presses key presses and holds mouse clicks analogue stick hold input text touch and multitouch motion control accelerometer joystick dance pad voice Display Display, which is the output of a system, is everything in the game that can be perceived by the player. Another way to look at it is as feedback to the player. Display can (and should) involve many senses, not just sight. For example, in a fighting game, if you press the button for a punch, what kind of feedback could you expect? Punching animation on player character Punching sound effect Player character power level dropping Enemy character reaction (block, hit, dodge, etc) Enemy character reaction sound effect Enemy character HP bar dropping Timekeeping Timekeeping is the last corner on the Triforce. You might not have considered this before, but many aspects of a game require some kind of timekeeping. Timekeeping is necessary whenever an action needs to happen through time. This includes every character, background, or GUI animation, some physics calculations...
by Tabby | Jan 4, 2013 | DataVis, Featured |
About a month ago I posted a little survey to a few sites to see if I could gather some data about Flash developers for an upcoming class I’m teaching. I left the survey open to any dev who wanted to take it, but since I was focusing on Flash in particular, the majority of people who responded did actually use Flash in some way. Over the last month I managed to collect 124 responses (way more than I was expecting) so I wanted to share the responses with the community so that we can all benefit from the (admittedly extremely unscientific) research. So, let’s see what we have. I’ve visualized each question and I will point out my observations/caveats as we go. The survey allowed respondents to choose as many categories as they felt appropriate. The survey was aimed to game developers so I mostly wanted to see how many people self-identified with that description. In retrospect, I probably should have added a fourth category for web developers. Regardless, about 3/4 of the respondents identify as game devs. The vast majority of respondents use Flash for work. Obviously since I was targeting Flash devs in particular, this ought to be the case and doesn’t reflect the percentage of developers who use Flash in the whole industry, even specifically games. But it’s reassuring that some 100+ Flash developers exist and are willing to take surveys! This question was meant to determine if the studio/workplace had more than one Flash developer or if the person responding didn’t use Flash but a co-worker did. In retrospect this question was somewhat confusing...
Recent Comments