Game Dev

Games should be for everyone, but are really creating them for everyone? Accessibility in video games is a very important topic in games development because by tackling this subject, we can provide meaningful experiences to even more players, and with the example of some major companies I hope that developers will pay more attention to it.

So this article brings a lot of useful tips that can help you in developing a more accessible game, and they won’t even be that difficult to do it if you consider them from the start.

Just giving you some hints, when talking about deaf accessibility we can add in our games subtitles/closed captions (preferably configurable ones), visual cues, controller vibration and other actions that will help players to fully enjoy our games.

Performance in games is a constant topic, games platforms processing power are constantly growing, but so are the games complexity created for these platforms, so for those of you who are there trying to squeeze each fps you can get this post about Basic Game Optimization Techniques might come in hand.

When having performance issues in your game start by profiling it, most game engines will have some tool to do it, and you will get a lot of insights in what’s happening under the hood.

After identifying what is the true problem of your game you may apply a suited solution for it, of course it all depends on the problem, this post focuses more on “programming stuff”, like memory speed and parallel programming, but there are many other ways to improve performance like the LOD technique, lightmaps, texture atlasing and others.

Optimizing games is a hard task which sometimes comes late in the project when very difficult to handle it. But if you’re facing performance there are three steps that will help you gain that needed increase in FPS.

1. Identification: The first step is to identify what aspects from the game are negatively impacting the performance and select ones on top of the list, because spending a lot of time optimizing something that will bring little benefit is not so useful. So know what to optimize, and how much it will benefit you.

2.  Comprehension: The second step is to understand why the specific part is slow, and why it was done that way in the first place. Knowing the root of the problem will let you create an effective solution, without breaking other parts of the game.

3. Iteration: The third step is to apply your solution and execute another performance test to identify if the changes improved the game as needed comparing the new results with the previous ones, if yes congrats! If no, repeat the process.

Ideas the come from anywhere, any person and can appear in any moment, you think about something which at first it seems great, and you start working on it, any maybe the results are great or not, we never know before we try, but what happens when this “idea”, comes from the game itself?

Well, this is what this video talks about it, while developing a game ideas are executed and we never know 100% what outcomes they will have, and with this some great things can happen, while seeing these outcomes you may discover things in your game that may be even more fun than the design you were aiming for, and this video advice you to listen to your game and “follow the fun”.

Following the fun means that you see something in your game you really like, and than you start to turn your efforts in maximizing this fun because maybe that could be the part that stands out from your game, even though it was not made on purpose.

I think that this is a good philosophy, because many times I had face myself trying to get “my design” work in the game even though I had something right in front of my face calling for my attention, maybe it was just a very simple little detail from the game, but it was really fun just to play with.

Hitboxes are invisible after the game is launched, but they are present in almost every game and play a fundamental role in providing interactivity between all objects in a game.

Since hitboxes are invisible, sometimes they can go unnoticed and lack the necessary attention in understanding how they work and what are some good guidelines in configuring them.

So I found this post about hitboxes which explain how they work and how some major games approach this subject, it’s important to notice that depending on the game genre hitboxes can have quite a different configuration. Take the shoot’em up for example, in these games the player character normally has a small hitbox, which help the player to avoid projectiles in a fair way. In fighting games however hitboxes are completely different, they are dynamic and change size and position depending on the character animation.

Camera Evolution in Third-Person Games

Cameras are one of the three C’s in game development (Character, Controls and Camera), and is a fundamental part of any game, 2D or 3D.

When we talk about 3D games, one of the most common cases are the third-person games, which receive this classification because the camera is from a third person perspective, and you can see yourself in the screen, but this type of camera evolved a lot to reach the point it is presented in modern games like God of War (2018) or Uncharted 4 for example.

This post describes how third person cameras evolved from being fixed in old games like Resident Evil where the camera did not move and simply switched to another one, to being fully dynamic in modern games like Resident Evil 4 and GTA 5, where not only the camera follows the character through the scene but also the player can rotate it, and the camera also some some level of intelligence to switch between shots and avoid collision depending on the situation.

People sometimes ask me question like: how can I learn to develop games? Do you have some tutorials or books to recommend me? And I always reply: well, it all depends on what role do you want to fill.

If you are starting, it’s important to understand that to develop a game, a lot of different backgrounds are required, like programming, art, animation and game design just to name a few. This post gives a glimpse on all of these roles so it’s a good starting point in deciding what path you can follow in your career.

But regardless of which path you choose, I strongly advice you to start building small games or prototypes as soon as possible, look for tutorials in the internet and download some game engine like Unity or Construct and start building something, by doing this you will rapidly discover what you like the most or not and also speed up your knowledge in game development.

In these last days I’ve been searching for games to relax and just have a good time without the pressure of ultra action or competitive games, and I’m glad I did this search because I found two games that brought me just that feeling.

Sky: Children of Light (Android) and Costume Quest 2 (PC) are two games that I’m currently playing that have some similarities. For me they are both cute, relaxing, have a sense of adventure and are very accessible for many types of players.

So by searching and playing these games, I got myself thinking about this pandemic situation the world is facing, and I’m glad that this form of games exist, and not only the stressful, hard and competitive games. I mean, I really appreciate these kinds of games, but I’m not in a mood for them right now, so it’s wonderful that developers have the freedom to create their projects with their own vision, because the games public is very diverse. 

I always loved Japanese games like the ones created by Capcom, even though they have very interesting stories, they are not heavy scripted games that focus only in the narrative, but they also give great importance to gameplay, and I love how they mix these two parts together.

Releasing great games required mixing visual arts, audio, user interaction, creating compelling stories and many more items. This article talks about this last item, and how one can use storytelling to improve the player experience.

Some tips on creating a good story is having defined moments on it, with a beginning, a middle and an end, which helps the audience to follow the narrative. Other item that this article points is how focusing on the background of each character is important. This is useful so each character can have their own wills, manners, which makes each one of them memorable, think of Kratos, Snake, Master Chief, each of them have a story linking them with their universe, but also have strong background stories that make them unique.

Healthy Soft Developer

I’m always trying my best to become a better developer, not only improving my technical skills, but also improving my soft skills and use these skills to be a better person and professional.

Technical skills are utterly important in any profession, however knowing how to talk to your team, express yourself, ask for feedback, knowing how to pass feedback and many more skills of this type are also fundamental once you work in a team, which is the most common way of developing games.

This YouTube channel that has some greats tips on these subjects that are so precious in the fast paced environmental that are game development studios, so I hope you enjoy it too.

Why you need a game career strategy

Building a career is by no means an easy task, and when starting a career many questions can come up to your mind. Like what kind of studies to do, how to land that first job in some industry without having experience and many many more things.

This article has some great tips on planning a career in the games industry, for people starting up, for those who want to go indie or to work on big studios, so it’s worth a read.

For me personally, one of the things that I knew from the start is that I should have a portfolio, this way I could display the games I made, personal projects, made in jams, or projects created on university. This portfolio should look great and this would help me, as it did. So this is my tip, if you want to start in the games industry, produce as many projects as possible and display them in a fashion manner, in my opinion this helps a lot.

Western and Japanese RPGs does have many differences, but as can be seen in this video, their origins are very similar, that as time passed evolved into creating many different games.

This video argues that the two main differences from western and japanese RPGs is that that western RPGs tend to focus on complex games, created for hardcore gamers with a less defined narrative where the player typically role-play a character designed by himself. And Japanese RPGs tend to focus on more simple accessible games, with a predefined character and focused on story.

As games evolved so did the UIs present on them. UI can help player navigate, find information and accomplish goals, so they present themselves in some different ways.

This article describes the four classes of game UI, they are: Non-Diegetic, Diegetic, Meta and Spatial. As the article displays, by answering two questions you can identify what kind of you you need. 1º Question: Does the component exist in the game story. 2º Question:  Does the component exist in the game space?

For exemple: a life meter is a Non-Diegetic UI, because it answers no to both questions. Racing lines in a car game is a spatial UI, because it’s present in the game space, but not in it’s story.

Simplifying Game Interfaces: Principles for Hiding UI Complexity is an article that talks about how games can accomplish many complex tasks by relying in simple player inputs and breaks this into some aspects like:

Input Amplification: When from a simple input many things happen in a game, like when the player presses the right arrow in Mario from Super Nintendo, Mario starts walking, the camera moves, objects start appearing on screen, the game tests if Mario jumped into some enemy and the list goes on, so all this features that happen in the background is a great way to simplify player input.

Context Sensitivity: This aspects talks about setting multiple actions to the same button, and this actions will change depending on the context, so for example, when near a door the X button is used to open the door, and when near a lever the same X button is used to pull the lever. So this button is used like an “Interaction” button, that will have different meanings depending on where the player is.

Interface In Game is a great site that collects loads and loads of screenshots and videos from game UI’s.

You can search by a specific game and see many screens from it to get inspiration to create your game UI. Or you can also search for screenshots for specific game features, like credits, dialogue, game over, inventory, loading, level selection, lobby and many more features.

Adding Life To Worlds With Dialogue Barks

Dialogue barks are these little moments that some NPC thinks out loud and give the player some info. This can be something quite trivial like the NPC talking how was his day, what’s going on in his job or just saying that the sky is beautiful today. 

But there is another kind of bark that can pass some important info to the player, like some enemy in a stealth game saying that he saw something in the player’s direction, some NPC saying that he heard something and will check it out, or even some NPC talking about some treasure that he heard that is hidden somewhere around a part of the map, this kind of barks will give some tips to the  player about what is happening in the world around him, and even may trigger some decision into the player making him micro-manage his actions in that moment.