Coltness HS – Computer Games Development
BGE & NPA
Craft Studio has just came to my attention, it promises much and with any luck it might deliver.
CraftStudio is a real-time cooperative 3D game-making platform!
You can make your own 3D models and maps, put them together in scenes and add behaviors to them
Its still fairly basic but you should be able to knock up a quick clone of yourself in no time following some of the many online guides, there are also plenty of videos you tube.
What a week its been for the UK games industry.
Game has went into administration. What a lot of people haven’t noticed is that gamestation is part of the game group.
Game sales have surpassed video sales and music sales. While a lot of people think of computer games as “niche” it should be obvious to everyone that they are main stream.
Tax breaks for video game makers. The UK is giving tax breaks to companies developing games in the UK, hopefully this will reverse the trend that has seen us go from 3rd to 6th in the table of games developers.
I love this series of videos (mostly because I remember most of what they are talking about ). Here are some to get you started.
I am a big fan of video game emulators. These programs allow computers to run software written for other platforms. The results are not always perfect, but the faster the computer and the longer it is since the original platform was released the better the experience tends to be. There are a number of commercial products that allow you to get the arcade experiance in your own home. There has been a recent rise in the number of online emulators. These allow you to take classic consoles games for a spin. There are a number of problems with emulators, the most serious of which is that most of the games are still protected under copyright and have not passed into the public domain.
Recently emulators have made it on to consoles and now companies are selling their old games all over again, to a new generation of games players. However, with the rise of multicore processors it is now possible to emulate current generation consoles on a fairly modest PC. This does have big copyright issues as the games have not been licenced to these platforms.
The next big market is obviously mobile phones and we are starting to see some emulators for the most powerful phones, but how do you control them? I hear you ask, well look no further.
It’s easy to see an amusement arcade at the seaside or at a fun fair. However, it wasn’t that long ago that there was an arcade on every high street. Nowadays these tend to just have gambling machines in them. The name arcade game comes from these arcades.
I found this site that has classic arcade games. These games were often designed to separate you from your pocket money. They are quite fast paced and last between 30s and 5 minutes on average. Some players, though, could play for hours on a single 10p credit.
In a way modern phone and browser games are like arcade games, they are designed to give you a few minutes of entertainment and make you come back for more.
The 1980-games site also has Nintendo and other games. It doesn’t have my favorite, but I have sunk a lot of 10ps into some of these games.
I’m not sure where I stumbled upon this graphic. Take a trip down console memory lane and reminisce about how you held a N64 controller.
I wish this had the computer controllers like the quick shot pro, Competition Pro and Kemspton interface.
The discussion in class was on target audiences for computer games genres.
A recent survey has listed 33 million computer game players in the UK alone. The interesting point for me was proof that gamers don’t give up and move on to other media .
25 to 45 year olds are identified as having the most number of players (44%) compared with 45 to 65 year olds (33%) and 16 to 24 year olds (23%) with the least amount.
Some game genres appeal more specific groups in the population and age ranges. These are defined as the target audience. Take for example the games at the cbeebies website, these are aimed at the pre school audience. Some games are aimed at one gender more than others, there has been a recent rise in the number of games aimed at female gamers. This has been partially driven by social networks and smart phones as well as pink consoles. If you look at the numbers on the survey you will see the there is only 2% of a difference in the number of male/female gamers.
The PEGI (Pan European Game Information) ratings system, classifies games to better inform the consumer about the games they are purchasing. The UK also uses the BBFC system which is legally enforceable. Here is a list of their recent classifications.
I heard this on John Beatie’s radio Scotland show Today (21st Feb 2012)
(c)BBC – the iplayer link is here
We talked last week about future trends in gaming and I was talking about Augmented Reality (AR) games, GPS based games as well as treasure hunts. Well I just stumbled upon on this post on a Microsoft product and game idea.
There are a ton of “physics” games out there, line rider games are just one subset of them.
There are a number of great pieces of level design out there. I liked this one because of it size. Try the whole site though there are loads of other levels. You can sign up and make your own, my advice… start small. I would like to remind you that I am not responsible for the content of other sites.
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