Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Tutorials work best when they naturally integrate into the game story. For example, the game character might start
running around in their safe home town, learning the basic movement controls. Next the character practices fighting
together with a few friends. And after, that the player goes into the woods to try to shoot some birds with a bow. This will
provide all the practice needed for the fights later in the game.
You should make sure your tutorial levels work and that players remember the controls even if they put the game away
for a couple of days. Otherwise, they may never come back to the game.
Adding Sound Effects
To finish the game, you should add sounds and music at the right spots. As you may remember,
one of the choices in the Options menu is to change the background volume. You do that using the
following line of code:
sounds.music.volume = this.musicSlider.value;
In the PenguinPairs class, you start playing the music:
sounds.music.play();
Similarly, you play sound effects at appropriate moments, just as you did in the Jewel Jam game.
For example, whenever a pair of penguins is made, you play a sound effect (see the update method
in the Animal class):
sounds.pair.play();
If you look at the PenguinPairsFinal example belonging to this chapter, you can see how the complete
game works and where sound effects are played back, and of course you can play the game yourself.
WORKING IN TEAMS
The first generation of games was created by programmers. They did all the work. They designed the game mechanics,
they created the art (which consisted of just a few pixels), and they programmed the game in an Assembler language.
All the work focused on the programming. The game mechanics were often adapted to what could be programmed
efficiently.
But when more memory became available, this slowly changed. Creating fancy-looking objects with a limited number
of pixels and colors became an art form, and such pixel artists started to play an important role in developing games.
In the early days there were no drawing programs (no computer was powerful enough for that). Pixelated characters were
designed on graph paper and then turned into hexadecimal numbers to be put into the game code.
With the increase of computer power and storage media like the CD, art became increasingly important, and the artists
developed with it. 3D graphics and animations became common, leading to new specialists who could use the new tools
and technologies developed to support such work. Nowadays artists make up the majority of game production teams.
 
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