Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Generating the game idea
Of course, the primal intention of many fresh game developers is to create a first-per-
son shooter. This is a good dream, but a very bad idea. A competitive modern FPS,
even if it is going to be developed for handheld devices, requires titanic efforts, that
is, a gigantic job that will be enormous for small teams. There should be an original
concept that can attract the attention of the audience: a good story, tons of accurate
3D models and textures, great animation, perfect special effects, optimized graphics,
minimum glitches, and an ideal balance in a new, competitive FPS. Don't forget the
hundreds of hidden nuances and pitfalls.
It is more reasonable to reduce our ambitions a little bit and start with a smaller project
to experiment with. It is good to take some ideas from the good old arcades. For ex-
ample, the Shoot 'em up subgenre, where a character is surrounded with lots of en-
emies and needs to hold fire all the time, is the mechanics from Space Invaders. The
animation of a 3D character is not an easy job. For your first game, you may try to
make the process easier by reducing a number of movable parts of the protagonist.
The most obvious way is to put him inside a vehicle; in that case, there will be no need
to create any types of walking cycle animations. For instance, the protagonist may
move using some sort of flying vehicle. As far as the Space Invaders are concerned,
it is good to put the player into space. Thus, the main character will be an astronaut,
and use a small space craft to move. He will have a laser gun. There will be some as-
teroids and space junk around as well as angry enemies. The protagonist is alone, so
the objective is clear—to return to the other people who are battling their way through
hordes of opponents. Yes, we got the idea!
Writing the plot
A huge starship called Danube is moving in space. This is a cargo ship carrying
unique resources from colonies on far away planets. It comes back fully loaded to
Earth. The mission is very important because Earth is totally out of resources, and
completely depends on regular transports from the new lands (the far away planets
are still in the state of terraformation, so they are not ready for the normal life of hu-
man beings). If the ship will not return in time or lose its precious cargo, mankind
will face hard times. The world economics will collapse, there will be a huge politic-
al crisis, and there might even be several wars for dribs and drabs of resources that
are conserved by some countries. Therefore, all of the crew fully concentrate on their
