Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
show, where the story and action unfold in a linear manner from opening scene
to final credits. Storyboards for games help plan actions and events that need to
be created by the character/prop designers, background artists and animators,
engine designers, and game coders.
Storyboards are also used extensively for
cutscenes
(also called
cinematics
or
in-game movies
) and trailers for games.
Your flowchart
(see Chapter 3,
“Core Game design
Concepts”) helps
point out decision
points in the game.
Storyboards are cre-
ated to help design
more detailed inter-
actions for major
plot points.
o
r I G I n s
o F
C
u t s C e n e s
The first cutscenes in games were created as a type of intermission, or
interlude, during gameplay.
In 1980, the game
Pac-Man
had little animated movies that showed Pac-
Man being chased around by the ghosts he battled during gameplay. These
original cutscenes were silent; it wasn't until
Donkey Kong
, in 1981, that
audio was added to them.
World of Warcraft:
Cataclysm
has cutscenes throughout the game; however,
when your unique character reaches a plot point where the cutscene starts,
the game engine drops your character directly into the movie. You don't
interact with the other characters or elements of the scene, but it makes it
more fun to see your character moving around in the movie.
Usually, cutscenes
are linear movies that
play from start to
finish without inter-
action. technology
is coming that will
allow players to inter-
act with them.
Just as for film or TV production, game storyboards tend to be a combination
of graphics and text. The graphics are loose drawings that provide a visual blue-
print of what is going on in the scene; they can be drawn over several panels to
show progressions of the actions. The text is generally any dialogue that is spo-
ken, voice-over narrations, instructions for things that need to be created for the
scene (effects, animations, assets, and so on), and identifiers, such as the scene
number or date.
Again, at this stage of production, the storyboards are meant to be a flexible
design tool. They communicate the vision of the project to other members of
the team, and they also identify gaps in the gameplay, or what I like to call
boat
anchors
—graphics, animation, or any gameplay element that doesn't work and
will drag down the whole project.
Figure 4.13 shows a basic storyboard panel template. You can create your own
storyboard, stringing together several panels on a vertical or horizontal page,
depending on which works best for you.
