Introduction To Game Engineering

This course requires a lot of patience and dedication and in this tutorial you will be learning about a lot of interesting elements and components which you have been wondering till now, about how games are developed and engineered.

This is the tutorial which will give you a detailed overview of all the internal architecture and components required for Game development.

What is a Game?

Well, you all have heard about the term Game. A Game can be defined as an activity enrolled for amusement as a prepared form of play that basically undertakes for enjoyment and/or as an educational tool.

According to Game Theory, which is a study of mathematical models, while playing a game, there is either a win or a loss or a tie among the candidates participating in the game and that is based on the actions performed or the decisions taken during the gameplay.

The key components almost every game is having are its objectives, regulations and conventions, challenges, and interaction. While a player plays any game, it usually involves mental or physical stimulation and frequently both. This eventually boosts up human senses and reacting and thinking capability also (which we will discuss in the Advantages of Game Engineering and playing part). Many games help develop practical skills (like simulation games), while other serve as a form of doing exercises (VR and X-box oriented Games), while some other games helps developing educational or psychological potential.

What is a Video Game?

A video game can be defined as a game that runs on electronic devices which involves humans interacting with a user interface(UI) for generating visual responses on any video device like TV screen or computer monitor. This electronic game when played by a user, deals with a set of graphics, images or even audio to make the game more interactive.

In simple words, video games are the digital entertainment platform (which is a form of software) that humans "play" via a computer, TV, smart phones, tablets or other gaming consoles. The word video in video game was a traditional add-on which came into existence when people used raster display device (still used in some places), but after the 20th century, this term was used for any type of display device which had the capability to produce two- or three-dimensional images/videos.

Game Development

Game development is the procedure of creating video games which involves working on some platform/software to develop the game. The development is undertaken by a game developer which can be one person or a team of Game Engineers (for constructing the overall structure and game play), Designers (for designing the objects and animations), Coders (for coding and giving life to the game including logics, score and other calculations), Project Manager (for managing and promoting the game), Game Tester (who will test the game after it has been developed to find bugs in the game, if any). All of these human resources come under Game developers and the process of developing the complete game is termed as Game Engineering.

The first video games were developed and released in the year 1960. But for running those games, mainframe computers were required and were not available (at that time) to common public. Later, commercial games were made in 1970s with the era of 1st - generation video games along with consoles and home computers (desktops).

Who are Game Developers?

Game Developers are the people who create a game from scratch, and they work like software developers with a specialization in video game development - where the focus of the developer lies in creating video games. A game developer's team may vary from one person who undertakes every tasks (in developing a complete game) to a large business firm in which, to develop a game - the responsibilities are divided among individual disciplines, like programming, design, art & game play planning, testing, etc.

It is to be noted that a small game can be developed by one or two individuals (like Mario, Puzzle, Maze), but when it comes to large games like GTA, IGI, NFS, COD etc, a whole team of developers work to accomplish the game to success.

There are developers who have specialization in different game developing software (eg. Unity 3D, Unreal etc) or animating software (eg. Autodex Maya, Blender etc). Also developers may be specialized in a certain gaming platforms or game consoles (like the Nintendo's - Wii U, Sony's PlayStation 4, Microsoft's X-box etc), while other developers may develop games for specific devices like personal computers or smart phones.

Game Development Tools

Game development tools are specialized software solutions which allow and facilitate the development of a video game easier. In developing a game, the team of developers may need animation software to design a player, or trees, or any other object being used in the game; or a coder may need Visual Studio or MonoDevelop editor to inject specific code to move a game object, all these tools come under Game development tools. In other words we can say that the tools required to develop the complete game comes under the tag-line of game development tools. All these tools helps in engineering a game.