2D game design

Explaining game engines and Digital graphics

A game engine offers multiple purposes for game developers to create professional standard 2D and 3D games. The basic is that it’s simply a piece of software that is developed by studios to create video games. It is a program that can be licensed out and sold to other studios. The use of a game engine is that it takes an interactive environment and gives the player the freedom to explore it. 

There are multiple purposes of the game engine and how it fully works such as how it helps and stores game data, may include audio and video functionality and could contain scripting systems to make the game logic easier to code.

Using the game engine makes it to easier to put together models, animations, the overall assets of the game. Since in a 3D game, the game world can consist of thousands of polygons and the engine can remove anything we can’t see. The game engine itself can help out with a lot of things so this makes it an ideal and good asset when it comes to creating a 2D or 3D game. It’s the core functions when creating the game itself.

Inside game engines themselves. 

Going into more detail about game engines themselves, there are a lot more significant details that should be mentioned.

Even within the game engine, sound can be imported and used as nodes so that the game developer can program and manipulate them as they please. Being specifically played at certain points or make them loop, this can be a great way to put the edge on the game. 

Artificial intelligence is very important in games that will consist of having non playable characters. AI’s within the game are programed to move freely or within a set directional pattern. Acting a certain way if the character interacts with them or if an in game event happens.

This also counts for when it comes to objects within the games and the physics. The game engine lets the developer work with realistic physics or with unrealistic physics. Making the game more believable or let the mind run free, the game engine gives the developers and the artists the use to express and expand the ideas and capabilities of the game.

 Assets 

 The game asset pipeline can be frustrating. Here is a list of some of them

•       Graphical (texture, mesh, model)

•       Sound (effects, music, dialogue, file types, compression)

•       Behavioral (triggers, actions, scripts)

•       Sprites

•       Text ( Fonts )

Some examples of such assets are a game character model, the texture that is applied to it, the lines of dialogue that the character can utter, and the animations it can perform. A single character might require dozens of animations and lines of text and a game often has dozens of characters. Not only characters, but also levels are needed, maybe weapons, cinematics, music. An average game today easily contains thousands of assets. 

Although models, textures and levels are usually the most complex assets to handle, the other types of assets require serious attention as well. Sounds need to be converted to the right format, cinematics need to be compressed and scripts may need to be encrypted.

The use of a game engine

Game producers look to use game engines to save time and money. Of course using someone else’s game engine you have to keep in mind that using it for profitable reasons you have to purchase licensing. This gives the producers the right to use the game engine and permission to publish what they have created without facing legal actions against the game engines developers.

The whole use of a game engine is to make it easier for the developer to produce a game in the frame time they are given. Just like how Photoshop is to a concept artists or how pen and pencil are to traditional artist. They are the main assets that create the final product, a program that gives and lets the creator explore with all the functionalities that they need. 

Different game engines

There are different kinds of game engines ranging from open source engines, commercial engines to freeware engines. An example of these are,

-Source Engine
-CryEngine 3
-Unreal Engine 3 (UDK)
-RPG Maker
-Construct 2
-Infinity Engine
-Luminous Studio

Digital Graphics

Pixel: 

Pixels are small single squares grouped together to produce the image that is displayed in a digital picture. If a picture is 460 in width and 375 pixels in height, it has an image resolution of 460 by 375 pixels. After you times the length and the width you will find out how many pixels are actually in the image. If you wanted to print a smaller pixel image at an A3 scale and scaled it to size, you would end up with a blurry and terrible quality image. The higher the pixel size, the higher the quality of the image that is being printed out.

Raster images: 

 Raster images are consumed of a rectangular grid of pixels that are viewable by computer, paper or other displayable software. There are many different file formats that produce raster images, such as, BMP, GIF, JPG, TIFF and PGF. These images deal more practically than vector graphics with photographs and photo-realistic images.

Vector images: 

Vector images are the use of a mathematical input using points, lines, curves and shapes. Not using pixels this give an advantage when producing graphic work, although combining the use of raster programs and vector programs can lead to a great outcome.

File Extensions:  

File extensions are commonly used to imply information about the way data might be stored in a file. The name of the file is applied to indicate the encoding of its contents. There are different types of files such as music, imaginary and text.  Some Examples of these are BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF, JPG, PSD, TXT, ZIP, RAR, AAC and RAW.