Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Adding audio to a game
: Game engines provide tools to implement audio in your
game, may it be sound effects, which are played when specific events occur or the
background music to make it more immersive. Engines also usually allow users to
perform sound editing, such as tuning the volume or changing the pitch to better
merge them into the gameplay experience.
Creating the UI for the game
: As any game requires a UI, game engines provide
the tools to design game controls and the graphic interface for your game. It is gen-
erally a set of buttons and labels to display useful info to the player, but the most
professional software even offer compatibility with middleware tools to create very
advanced, dynamic GUIs, as is the case of Scaleform, used to craft the interface of
popular games such as
Batman Arkham Asylum
and
Mass Effect
.
Programming the enemy AI and script game events
: Not all engines provide ef-
fective enemy AI design tools. For example, in its former free versions, Unity 3D
was offered with no built-in tool to create paths for game characters, while the
Unreal Engine implemented waypoints and navigation meshes as part of the en-
gine itself, from the very beginning. When a useful function is not natively imple-
mented by a game engine, and pathfinding is one such function, it is very com-
mon that a third-party developer created those tools. Such is the case with the
A*
Pathfinding Project
for Unity, a package developed by
Aron Granberg
that provides
pathfinding and navigation meshes management for Unity. You can check it out at
On the other hand, all game engines offer the opportunity to code game events
triggered by the players' actions. The task is usually achieved through a scripting lan-
guage that is easy to grasp (when compared to a programming language) and allows
quick and easy implementation of game events. Lua is a scripting language imple-
mented by popular game engines such as Corona SDK. JavaScript is another and
it is used, for example, to script events in Unity 3D. Other engines may implement
their own scripting languages, as it is the case of the Unreal Engine (UnrealScript)
or GameMaker (GameMakerLanguage).
Building the executable of a game
: The last feature no engine can miss is cooking
everything you put inside your game to create the final build, the executable file
which will be downloaded by your players. The build of a game is basically the fi-
nal result you get from a game engine after you spent weeks or months feeding it
with graphic assets, script files, audio, and anything else you needed for your game.
Depending on the scope of the game you developed, cooking the final build can take
