Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
For new designers, there are several great books and videotapes available on
3-D modeling. Don’t hesitate to get Maya Personal Learning Edition from
www.aliaswavefront.com, gmax from www.discreet.com, or Wings 3D from
www.wings3d.com and start building some low polygon characters and props.
LAYOUT AND STAGING
In your design document, you will have your topographic maps and level specifications
as discussed in Chapters 1–3, right? From this information, you will do your basic layout
and staging. You will create an appropriate environment, and you will start to
stock it with good guys, bad guys, props, and items. Designers spend large amounts of
time helping to manage the layout/staging building and refinement process.
You will have new art, code, and audio assets coming into the game from all directions
at almost all times. Asset management (www.nxn-software.com) and file
referencing will quickly become your best friends. NXN are leading providers of digital
asset management software. You can learn more about asset tracking software by
visiting this site. You will need the ability to find game assets quickly and you will
want the capability to replace existing parts of the game build with new, other, or
updated parts as quickly and efficiently as possible. There might be 35 lampposts in
your level, but the new improved lamppost just came in from the art department. You
won’t want to search you entire level by hand or filename to find all 35 lampposts;
you’ll want to simply change the file reference pointer once.
Designers spend plenty of their time building and refining game scenes due to
sometimes shifting layout and staging requirements and concerns. Build your abilities
to compose scenes in 3-D.
If you’re entirely new to this process, get a copy of DOGA (www.doga.co.jp) and
start setting up scenes with the free parts included with this shareware package. You
won’t use DOGA in actual game construction, but it will help familiarize you with
working in 3-D. DOGA helps you learn to build up scenes using premade pieces in a
3-D setting.
S CRIPTING
Don’t forget that scripting ability now seems to be a basic requirement for most design
positions; so consider digging into at least one scripting language like JavaScript, Python,
or Visual Basic. The better you get at writing and editing simple scripts the better!
A designer can’t be expected to write huge convoluted scripts, but he or she needs
to know how to use an editor to change basic script values with some ease.