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.
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.
If you’re a budding games designer in the midst of developing your game concept, understanding the different roles that game features and game mechanics play will help you have a better ideation process.
I’ve been freelancing as a web programmer for more than 6 years now, but (surprisingly) I’ve never known the intricacies behind how web domain names worked until today (I had to help a client resolve some issues regarding it). The understanding came to me in an epiphany only after I’ve read and pondered on many articles, Wikipedia pages and Stack Overflow pages over the past few days.
Because web domains can be an incredibly complex business, and all the online instructionals I’ve found are really long, I wrote this in such a way that it imparts a big picture view. Hopefully, it’ll help you figure things out faster than I did.
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:
