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Games

Image by Martin Vorel from https://stocksnap.io/photo/KLIK5Q5KX2
Image by Martin Vorel from https://stocksnap.io/photo/KLIK5Q5KX2

A primer on images for game developers

If your work involves sitting in front of a computer, chances are — at some point or another — you’ll have to work with digital images. For most people, it’s more than enough to know how to save images into the right formats. If you’re a game developer though, it’ll help to have a bit more in-depth knowledge, since you’ll be working with game engines that like to throw around obscure terms like true color, bit-depth or ARGB-16.

I struggled a lot with images during my early days in game development precisely because of these terms — Google searches and Wikipedia articles only led me to pages with big words that confused me even more. With time, I eventually figured things out — hence this primer. Hopefully, reading this means you won’t take as long as I did to figure things out.

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Viking Harbour by Whiteoxygen
Art by Melcolm Lek

Making use of inheritance in game programming

A common problem I see in novice Unity game programmers is that they often create too much unnecessary, duplicate code. Take, for example, the programmer who creates a simple 2D platformer with a player character and a generic enemy character to be duplicated across the level. What often happens is that two separate scripts will be created — one for the player character, and one for a generic enemy character. Each individual script will define its own behaviours for things such as movement, jumping, dealing damage and receiving damage, and most of the code between these two scripts is similar because the character types have so much in common.

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War of the Worlds - Melcolm Lek
Art by Melcolm Lek

The high concept: what it is and why you need it.

The high concept is a concept (no pun intended) that is very relevant to people working or studying in creative fields. In this article, we’ll be tackling this idea from the perspective of games design, though it is a relevant concept for any industry where you are trying to create a product or service that appeals to people.

Let’s start with a simple definition of what a high concept is: it is the first thing you tell someone when they ask you what your game is about. Here are some traits a high concept should have:

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