Level design

 To be a successful designer you would need a tremendous traditional art or architectural experience, and a tremendous frame rate, game flow and pacing experience You need both qualities to do good in level design. A digital architect is a dedicated individual who spends their time creating and developing levels. These architects have good artistic skills, traditional art, architectural, frame rate, game flow and pacing experience. With Moore’s law in place the future of digital architects will keep changing, more and more architects will be required in order to create levels in time. Moore’s law says that processor speed doubles every eighteen months and 3d accelerators constantly get better. More digital architects will be needed for each level because of the huge size and graphical mass, games are getting better and better. A level designer is sometimes thought of as a chef or is likened to glue. The chef part is that the level designer will take ingredients (bits) from other talented people and mix them together while sticking to the recipe (the plan) of a design document.As for the glue part of a level designer this all down to how important the level designer is. Designers have become one of the most important members of developing teams, this is because they take parts, textures, ideas, characters and have to plan out where things are placed and what things are used.The designer has to shape his level around the ideas and work he has from other people.http://www.cliffyb.com/art-sci-ld.html(information on whats needed for a level designer)

Importance of a renderer

The cpu in while in game will use 50% of its processing just to render a games engine, If the rendering is wrong  then the game company making the engine can be called a joke.The acronym ‘API’ stands for application program interface, this is how the 3d graphics work. ‘API’ is all about three-dimensional math, how 3d rendering works and how to get it on screen.It is more difficult to build a renderer for a pc than a console, this is because the hardware for a pc is always changing and getting better. When it comes to consoles the hardware is still, in other words it doesn’t change at all except until a new console comes out.Vertices are stored 3d objects in a 3d world that have a relation to each other. These vertices have a relation because the computer has to draw lines or fill surfaces between these points in the world.The renderer in a games engine is replaceable if the engine is good enough. Many cross-platform engines e.g. the unreal engine do just this and are playable on all the consoles out at that time.

What is a Games Engine?

A game engine is  the core of a game, a software componant that handles all the necessary technology such as rendering and artificial intelligence (AI).

A game engine is alot different from the game itself, its alot like a car and a car engine, you can take the engine out of the car and build another shell around it and this is what games are like. Today multiple games will use the same game engine.

Unreal Tournament 3                         Gears Of War

Unreal 3 engine

History of 2d games engines

The first game to be made was Spacewar, this 2d game took many years and much development to finally be shipped with each PDP computer at the time. Spacewar never kicked off untill two university students played the game and remade a new game based on it. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney made a clone game called Computer Space, this became a failure because of complex controls,and pages of instructions. A few years later Nolan and Ted developed Atari Inc.

 Some of the first 2d games include Donkey Kong (1981), Space Invaders (1978), Pacman (1980), Pong (1972)