Producer
A game producer is essentially the game project’s leader. The producer will draw up and track the schedule, manage the people who do the hands-on development work, and oversee the budget and expenditures. The producer may not know how to make any part of a game at all, but he is the one person on a game project
who knows everything that is happening and why.
It’s the producer who needs to poke the other developers in the ribs when they seem to be lagging. The producer must be aware when different members of the team are in need of some tool, knowledge, or resource and arrange to provide the team members with what they need.
The producer will also be the team’s interface with the rest of the world, handling media queries, negotiating contracts and licenses, and generally keeping the big noisy bothersome world off the backs of the development team.
Designer
As a game designer, you will decide the theme and rules of the game, and you will guide the evolution of the overall feel of the game. And be warned—it had better be fun!
There are several levels of designers: lead designer, level designer, designer-writer,character designer, and so on. Large projects may have more than one person in each design role. Smaller projects may have only one designer or even a designer who also wears a programmer’s or artist’s hat! Or both!
Game designers need to be good communicators, and the best ones are great collaborators and persuaders. They need to get the ideas and concepts out of their heads and into the heads of the rest of the development team. Designers not only create the concept and feel of the game as a whole but also create levels and maps
and help the programmers stitch together different aspects of the game.
The lead designer will put together a design document that lays out all the aspects of the game. The rest of the team will work from this document as a guide for their activities. A design document will include maps, sketches of game objects, descriptions of plot devices, flow charts, and tables of characteristics. The
designer will usually write a narrative text that describes how all of these parts fit together. A well-written and thorough game design completely describes the game from the player’s perspective.
Unlike the producer, a designer needs to understand the technical aspects of the game and how the artists and programmers do what they do.
Programmer
Game programmers write program code that turns game ideas, artwork, sound, and music into a fully functional game. Game programmers control the speed and placement of the game artwork and sound. They control the cause-and-effect relationships of events, translating user inputs through internal calculations into
visual and audio experiences.
There can be many different specializations in programming. In this book you will be doing a large amount of programming of game rules, character control, game event management, and scoring. You will be using TorqueScript to do all of these things.
For online game programming, specialization may also be divided between client code and server code. It is quite common to specify character and player behavior as a particular programmer specialty. Other specialty areas might be vehicle dynamics, environmental or weather control, and item management.
Other programmers on other projects might be creating parts of the 3D game engine, the networking code, the audio code, or tools for use with the engine. In our specific case these specializations aren’t needed because Torque looks after all of these things for us. We are going to focus on making the game itself.
Visual Artist
During the design stages of development, game artists draw sketches and create storyboards to illustrate and flesh out the designers’ concepts. Artists will later create all the models and texture artwork called for by the design document, including characters, buildings, vehicles, and icons.
The three principal types of 3D art are models, animations, and textures—and the artists who create these types of art are 3D modelers, animators, and texture artists, respectively.
- 3D modelers design and build player-characters, creatures, vehicles, and other mobile 3D constructs. In order to ensure that the game gets the best performance possible, 3D modelers usually try to make the least complex model that suits the job. A 3D modeler is very much a sculptor working with digital clay.
- Animators make those models move. The same artist quite often does both modeling and animation.
- Texture artists create images that are wrapped around the constructs created by 3D modelers. Texture artists take photographs or paint pictures of various surfaces for use in these texture images. The texture is then wrapped around the objects in question in a process called texture mapping.
- Texture artists help the 3D modelers reduce the model complexity by using highly detailed and cleverly designed textures. The intent is to fool the eye into seeing more detail than is actually there. If a 3D modeler molds a sculpture in digital clay, the texture artist paints that sculpture with digital paint.
Audio Artist
Audio artists compose the music and sound in a game. Good designers work with creative and inspired audio artists to create musical compositions that intensify the game experience.
Audio artists work closely with the game designers to determine where the sound effects are needed and what the character of the sounds should be. Audio artists often spend quite a bit of time experimenting with sound-effect sources, looking for different ways to generate the precise sound needed. Visit an audio artist at
work and you might catch him slapping rulers and dropping boxes in front of a microphone. After capturing the basic sound, an audio artist will then massage the sound with sound-editing tools to vary the pitch, to speed it up or slow it down, to remove unwanted noise, and so on. It’s often a tightrope walk balancing
realistic sounds with the need to exaggerate certain characteristics in order to make the right point in the game context.
Quality Assurance Specialist
Quality Assurance (QA) is a somewhat fancy name for testing. The general field of QA is more extensive than that, of course, but in the game business game testers take the brunt of the QA load. The purpose of testing is to ensure that a finished game is really finished, with as few bugs or problems as humanly possible. QA
testing requires the quality assurance specialist, or game tester, to play each part of a game, trying to flush out all glitches and bugs.
Most of the problems QA testing will find are visual or behavioral: text that doesn’t properly wrap on an edge, characters that don’t jump correctly, or a level that has buildings misplaced. Testing can find game play problems; these are usually related more to the design than the programming. An example could be that the running speed of a player might not be fast enough to escape a particular enemy when it should be more than fast enough.
QA specialists need to be able to communicate well in order to write useful and meaningful bug reports.
For more details call me : +91 98330082617
+919830082617
