Now that you have reached the end of the Teams and Tools course, it's time to review what you just learned. The aim of this course was to give you an overall picture of the team members' roles and tools that are needed in game development.
As you have now learned, the team consists of a variety of different roles, producers, designers, and programmers to name a few. And making a game requires the right tools. Most of the work of course requires a computer, but in the beginning, it's not unheard of to use pen and paper to just write down notes and ideas.
The workload depends on the size of the team. Some may develop a game all on their own while big AAA game studios have hundreds of people with different specializations. The game development tool selection is also abundant, and you can use the so-called industry standards or the free software to create the code and the art.
The game development team doesn't have to be big, even one or two people can create a popular game, but the tasks should be assigned according to the skill sets. In smaller teams having multiple roles, like one person working as a producer and a designer is common, and artists may also jump in as programmers if they have the skills.
In bigger game studios, the work can be divided according to the job specialization. One designer can work on the narrative aspect and the other design the gameplay levels, for example.
Having overall knowledge from design, art, and programming is beneficial as it helps understand others and makes the cooperation smoother as everyone is talking at the same "level".
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Game art is what the player sees at first and, some may even decide if they are going to play or not just based on the art, so creating the visuals that arouse interest is both important and challenging.
Game art is a broad term that covers an immense amount of different art styles and specializations. Game art is normally categorized into 2D or 3D art and those are divided into smaller parts like pixel art, low-poly art, and countless others.
Sometimes there are examples that the games with not so finished looking art have succeeded, like Undertale. In these cases, the gameplay and the story are the supporting pillars.
Creating game art can be done with the so-called industry-standard software or with free software. Much big game company relies on the likes of Adobe and Autodesk's software, but many professional companies are also using free-to-use Blender to create 3D art and Krita for 2D art. The software has differences between them, but overall it really comes to the artist’s capabilities of using the tools.
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Designing a game may sound easy, but it actually has so many different things that should be taken into consideration. Game design can start just with a pen and paper and not all games are necessarily digital, remember that there are traditional games like card and board games. Those could also serve as a good fountain of inspiration.
Game design is what keeps people playing and return time and time again. But before that can happen, the game needs to be tested repeatedly, preferably with multiple people. Getting feedback helps you to improve the game even further and adding more content.
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Games are essentially built with game engines. Engines like Unity and Unreal Engine are popular, require coding knowledge, and offer free licenses. Usually, if the published game is making revenue, you need to pay a cut for the engines' developers. Some big game studios use their in-house engines, which means that they have made their own engines from scratch to suit their needs.
There are also fully free engines that are beginner-friendly and updated all the time. They also have a helpful community grown around them. Godot and GameMaker are nice examples of free engines.
The majority of the game developers challenge themselves to learn more, for example, Urho3D offers quite a challenge for the programmers.
Or if you have the skills, you can always code your own game engine.
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