I’ll always remember my wife’s aunt turning to me one Christmas and quizzing me on what “games” – plural – I had made this month. Never has an eyebrow risen so quickly in bemusement. However, being on the inside of the industry, it is easy to forget that to others we operate mostly under a curtain of secrecy, occasionally throwing out trinkets when we deem them ready for public consumption.
With that in mind, I’ve set myself the task of producing a series of articles to shed light on what goes on behind the scenes at a games studio, imparting some knowledge on just how we go about trying to make a game. Hopefully with each instalment you’ll consider the curtain to have been raised a little higher, and by the time we’re done you’ll have a far greater understanding of the creative process.
Before we get too ahead of ourselves, I feel it necessary to introduce the players involved in such a production. When easing folk in to a discussion about how a game team operates and how all its many facets function together, I like to resort to the following description: designers come up with the ideas; artists create the assets to bring the world to life; programmers glue the whole thing together.
If only it were that simple. There are many specialised roles within those broad categories. So many, in fact, that it’s hard to keep tabs on all of them at any one time. Teams can expand and shrink, different skills are required at different stages, roles can evolve, and, as priorities shift, people can switch back and forth between teams.
What does remain constant, though, are those three initial descriptions. Wherever there’s a game being made, you’ll find designers, artists and programmers. So, in alphabetical order, may I present to you…
Artists
These are the talented people who are responsible for bringing us such a diverse range of styles. Be it the Latino Viva Piñata, the striking minimalism of Mirror’s Edge, or the half-tuck of Uncharted’s Nathan Drake.
There’s quite a chain involved in reaching that final, polished stage, though. Initially concept artists create images depicting the general themes and feeling of a title, before modellers take those pictures to create a range of 3D characters and backgrounds. Any character models are then sent off to riggers who insert a skeleton, which can then be brought to life by a team of animators.
Blurring the boundaries between programmers and artists, we also have technical artists. These like to dabble with scripting and programming, liaising heavily with the graphics programmers in a bid to bring the two disciplines closer together so as to extract the most from their pipeline and the console.
Designers
To my mind, a designer is often the most misunderstood role of any of those involved in the development process. Many believe that to be a good designer you simply need to be able to rattle off game concept after game concept in a bid to create the next triple-A behemoth. Though this may be true to some degree, their true talent lies in considering the player at every point of the experience. This could be as simple as ensuring the UI is as uncluttered and intuitive as possible, but it also expands into areas that border on psychology.
How does a player learn about your world? What rules have you set up and do you ever contravene them? Are colour palettes used to draw the eye correctly? Has this puzzle been adequately explained? Is there enough reward for this risk? Where are my scissors? It’s a barrel full of questions that always need consideration.
Pacing is also a key area, proving a constant balancing act. How do you keep a player engaged but not overwhelmed? How much legwork turns an expansive world into a tedious one? This has never been more pertinent than with motion-controls, where players could quite conceivable become physically exhausted if the pacing is not pitched correctly.
Programmers
The days of single-handedly producing full retail projects are behind us. With millions of lines of code now powering the magic, games are just as much a matter of project planning and coordination as they are knowing your way around C++.
The sheer scale of the task allows us coders to specialise in specific areas. There are the graphics programmers who pull all sorts of tricks to make things as shiny as possible, whilst AI specialists turn their hand to the tricky problem of providing an opponent for the player that’s good but not unbeatable. Network engineers dedicate themselves to providing smooth experiences over Live, and gameplay programmers are responsible for liaising with the designers and making the game “feel” right. Again, the latter in particular is becoming increasingly interesting with the advent of motion-controls and the new possibilities they present.
Away from the individual game teams, there are also engine and tool teams dedicated to supplying applications to ease development. These range from interfaces that sit on the PC, reporting back useful information from the console, to creating the means by which artists and designers can push their work directly to the console and then edit it in real-time.
Of course there are others; a host of producers, musicians and administrators help keeping things ticking over, but hopefully they won’t mind taking a back seat for the time being. Given what I have planned, each will get their day in the spotlight.
If you’d like a particular aspect of the industry discussed, please do get in touch at bigsheep@7outof10.co.uk and we’ll see what we can do.
I make my living as a programmer at a British games developer. In my spare time I try and spread myself between writing, gaming, drumming, goalkeeping, rolling dice and keeping my hair blue. Somewhere around that my wife fits in.
Disclaimer: the views expressed are my own and do not neccessarily reflect those of my employer. "
4 Comments
Awesome, Can’t wait for the rest of the series, the Games Industry has always interested me and i’ve always looked for openings within the design sections.
Any creative process takes a lot of love and heartbreak, I’ve spent months on projects in the past that were 99% completed and canceled at the last minute, notably a King Kong Sticker Collection that I busted my balls over, only to be canceled due to the lack of CGI images available and the secrecy behind Kong, who was just a monkey in the end, well Ape? whatever.
Looking forward to reading the ins and outs of a busy studio and the process a game takes, the directions the game may swing too, I can imagine a lot of head scratching and ditching of original ideas.
Something i’d like to read about is how big studios / distributors get involved, do they force artistic direction, are they controlling in terms of creativity or do you get a free rain on the development?
Sweet!
While I’be been an avid gamer for years and years I think Blackadder the 3rd can put my understanding of how games are developed from raw idea to fully fledged product far better than I ever could:
“I’m one of those people who are quite happy to wear cotton, but I have no idea how it works”
James, I leave it to you to enlighten me and as such I look forward to your insight.
Ta, you two. I’ll hopefully have the next one up within the fortnight looking at prototyping.
And, Mike, we’re currently going through an interesting shift in the way our creative thinking is channeled so I’ll let that settle but I’ll try and tackle your suggested topic at some point, too.
Looking very good James, would love to see how others feel in the industry.
I’ll keep tabs on this series