Do you love computer games and enjoy programming too? Then, don’t let your passion and interest go to waste. Anyone having studied a numerate subject at undergraduate level and gained computing skills can build his or her career in computer games technology by upgrading the knowledge base with advanced courses. And if you do Masters in computer games technology, there is no end to your learning and professional growth. There are numerous benefits that you can draw out of your higher skills and qualification.
Benefits of Studying Computer Games Technology
When you do higher studies or post graduation in this field, you acquire a competitive skill set which enables you to:
Gain strong technical skills making you a suitable candidate for programming positions within the most-sought after gaming industry
Design and create games from the beginning using standard computing languages
Become hands-on in graphics, audio, artificial intelligence, and physics
Understand the intricacies of developing games, right from pitching and designing game engine to creating a demo
Handle high-end games technology project, right from planning and management to implementation phase
Points to Remember for a Games Technology Aspirant
Post-graduation in games technology cannot be a casual undertaking. You could be a games addict, but there is a difference between playing games for fun and earning skills in building one. You do have to love games; however, at the same time you have to think beyond playing so that you can build your own game. When you pursue a professional degree in this line, you get to understand all the steps that go into the making of computer games. You learn about concepts, processes, marketing and launching of games.
Career in Computer Games Technology
With professional qualification and newly-developed skills, you can look for several roles in the computer games industry. A few options are listed below for you to ponder over:
Game Producer: You need to be well conversant with entire game production process, right from chalking out schedules and milestones for target achievements. For this, you have to have full understanding of both theoretical and technical fronts.
Game Engine Developer: If you choose this path, you will need to be highly disciplined and skilled. From programming native code to understanding technical process, pattern and terminology of different platforms will form an integral part of your role. It can be a rewarding career if you take it seriously.
Game Designer: The primary job of a game designer is to turn ideas into communicable forms, such as charts, sketches, writing and diagrams. You also have to make prototypes or a full-scale working model to help game programmers and co-developers get clear understanding of what needs to be done. You work on layout design too.
User Interface Programmer: It involves both designing and programming functions. As a UI programmer, you have to take charge of building user interface of video games. You need to be hands-on with UI logic, item inventory, mini-maps, buttons, and so on.
Summary:
If you study Masters in computer games technology, you will get to expand your talent portfolio.
New Post has been published on http://scitechnews.co.uk/games-technology/video-game-technology-helps-measure-upper-extremity-movement-in-patients-with-muscular-dystrophy/
Video game technology helps measure upper extremity movement in patients with muscular dystrophy
There is more to video gaming than escapism. By using gaming technology, researchers at a hospital are able to measure upper extremity movement in patients with muscular dystrophy.
Researchers have developed a way to measure upper extremity movement in patients with muscular dystrophy using interactive video game technology. Their hope is to expand inclusion criteria for clinical trials to incorporate patients using wheelchairs...View Original Article
***I’m going to post this blog here on Tumblr because I do not know where else to put it. Was thinking Gamasutra but that site is made up of industry experts and my post may seem a bit juvenile and unprofessional compared to the rest of them. Here it is, any feedback (or somewhere else I could put it) would be great!***
Mike Bithell (Creator of Thomas Was Alone and currently Volume) recently tweeted “indie is romantic, and the goal of many students I talk to, and honestly that worries me.. a risky way to start a career, very risky.”, which made me think about why it is such a popular, enticing idea to a student. I feel as though the main reason is due to the simple notion of popularity; the thing which devours a majority of younger people’s thoughts for a majority of their time as a teenager. More recently in the gaming scene, indies have been capable of getting their name out there, creating their own public image. There is that sort of ‘celebrity status’ that comes with being known, and a lot, and I mean a LOT, of younger audience members are attracted to the simple idea of being known. A person, sometimes two or three people, can be the face of their game, where as with larger games they have one or two people represent the entire company or franchise. Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes of Team Meat, Jonathan Blow, Rami Ismail and Phil Fish can all be recognised by a lot of people studying video games, but you could not say that every member of the team behind The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto V have the same extent of popularity, despite being part of the production of two of the most critically-aclaimed videogames to date.
There is also the sense of ‘community’ amongst indie developers, which is absent from the slight glimpse that most of us get of larger developers. Although there is that sort of bond and community present within larger companies (at least my week within a focus group at Rare demonstrated a really pleasant atmosphere that resonated from each staff member I talked to) it is absent from the public’s view unfortunately. Social networking has a large impact on a lot of younger individuals nowadays, and is becoming more influential than most things. Maybe if more of the workers within the larger part of the industry gained more of a voice, it may give a more realistic look to students. Maybe in the future, credit sequences will feature Twitter handles (or whatever is popular when Twitter becomes outdated). But no other entertainment medium has the people in the background at the forefront of their products the same way indie games do; you’re not likely to hear “Did you watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones? David Davidson’s input to the special effects were terrific, and the prop John Johnson created was immaculate, I cannot wait for the next episode he works on!”. It’s a shame, because a lot of people deserve recognition from time-to-time, but it is usually a single person, rather than a group, that will get the attention. When you hear ‘Gears of War’, ‘Bioshock’ and ‘The Elder Scrolls’, you think Cliff Bleszinski, Ken Levine and Todd Howard, not the teams of 100+ people collaborating towards a single concept.
The reason YouTubers and indies are glorified in such a way is because there is easy access to them, and it is simple enough to consume whatever they have to offer. Independent developers are renown for making wonderful, fantastically charming games that are not on such a large budge (although that does not make them any less important). Games such as Nidhogg and Luftrausers feature simple concepts that are easy to grasp, and can give you the general idea of the game within a short amount of time, and others such as Thomas Was Alone and Braid are filled with the creator’s personality and imagination.The same can be said for watching gameplay footage of a Let’s Player, seeing a five-minute chunk of footage or a compilation video gives you the general idea of what that person is like.
The problem with both is they are easy to access and easy to get the grips of. However, the actual process of making something is not. YouTuber Boogie2988 made a post of Tumblr referring to this, and while discussing PewDiePie said: “Basically he has the ‘it’ factor. What is that? Its a personality that’s visible, enjoyable, easy to relate to, and a ‘gives no fucks attitude.’“ The same thing could be said for the indie scene; a lot of indie games are easy to relate to, they’re mostly simplistic, feature a lot of personality and, most of all, give off the “gives no fucks attitude”. Teenagers are all about this attitude, hence why teenagers are typically depicted as angsty and hormone-riddled. Teenagers are also all about being free and expressing yourself, becoming self-aware and capable of exceeding your own expectations. A lot of the thoughts of a teenager are just overly-thought-out nonsense you eventually realise is not as substantial in reality as you once thought, but a lot of the passion within the games industry, at least vocally, comes from teenage fans. Not always positive passion, but nonetheless passion.
Being a student, I see a lot of people talk about their plans to be independent, and how they’re going to get their name out their so they become the next Team Meat, how their game idea is ‘better than Call of Duty’ and make them tons of money, although what some people say is way too ambitious to be pulled off by a single person without a large budget behind them. The thing they fear most is becoming a cog in an established company’s wheel, being a small piece of a studio’s puzzle. Students I am friends with talk about EA, Microsoft and other large companies as being these soulless giants who only think about financial gain from video games, but that is only the business side being looked at. A lot of what younger people see is a binary representation of the industry; you’re either independent or mainstream. There is no middle-ground. To them, they do not realize there are passionate developers who may make minor games in their spare time, or spend thousands of hours programming a game to have it dismissed as ‘just another sequel’, when a company wants a game they push a button then “boop”, a new Assassins Creed.
Indie developers come across with having this sort of charismatic passion, which is absent from the public eye’s view of what goes on with larger developers, as well as not having many restrictions on what they can do (could you see EA or Ubisoft publishing The Binding of Issac?). This idea of being able to do what you want is the sort of thing everyone dreams of. Everybody wants their own success story, and to be known and be significant to somebody. Hencse why independent developers were asked to participate in the train-wreck that was ‘GAME_JAM’, and not industry veterans; because they’re passionate AND popular. There is a Royal Republic song “Everybody Wants To Be An Astronaut”, which name-alone perfectly encapsulates the idea of wanting to be known for something you have done, but without clearly establishing how you will get around doing said ambition.
Throughout the first project of this year I have contributed a number of different things to the game, I created the basic template for the characters and applied textures to two of them, creating the AI and the player character. This was a fairly familiar task due to similar requirements in a task in the previous games course which required assets to be made in a similar art style. Perhaps my biggest contribution to this project however was the creation of the basic engine that the rest of the game was built around, I created the movement script for the player, as-well as all the necessary features for a room changing script, and the doors to apply the transition. Alongside this I created a menu system to be used at the beginning of the game. This is also the first asset created and therefore set the style for the rest of the pieces we created.
Whilst the majority of this code has been left un-touched, in-place, the movement for the character was tweaked to use the less demanding glide function as opposed to steps to help with optimisation for the Pi. This was not the only piece of optimisation I was responsible for, paired with Zsolt, we managed to vastly improve performance so that the game became playable on the Pi, as opposed to the low frame-rate struggle we had previously. We did this by removing the vast majority of loops in the game and heavily reducing the checks made every frame by replacing any of them we could with broadcasts, such as in the hiding and note showing scripts, as-well as the various checks done in the player sprite.
I was also responsible for implementing many of the features suggested and bug-fixes found in the playability test which was given to a number of people. After giving it to a few people, I noticed that a lot of people had trouble entering doors if they clicked too many times in a panic for example, which I then fixed by changing the way the room variable is set from each door and when the character is stationary.
The playtest itself was designed as a group and we came up with a few key themes we wanted to test:
Can it break? The most important question – does the user manage to break the game in any way
Is it intuitive? Does the user understand how to play the game
Are they immersed in the game? If they aren’t interested in the game then we haven’t designed it properly
Do they feel good after completing a task? If they escpae the AI or complete a puzzle, do they feel they have achieved something, if not – why not
Is the learning curve ideal for both casual and hardcore gamers?
Does the AI treat the player fair? The AI needs to be hard to evade, but it needs to be fair, if the player can’t escape him then the game becomes pointless
The final thing I did during this project was installing the operating system on the Pi, this was a simple enough task and worked as expected, providing an interesting look into the basics of how the Pi itself works.
