Game development

Developer diaries about creating Neverending Nightmares.
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sunsetbrew
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Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:55 am

Game development

Post by sunsetbrew »

My software career is pretty far from game development (telecom and network). I am a software architect, specializing in middle-ware server frameworks. But I often find my innovating design inspirations in other areas of the arts and software. This time around, I am scourging the gaming industry for inspiration. Currently I am reading "Beginning 3D Game Development with Unity 4: All-in-one, multi-platform game " by "Sue Blackman". I think picking a book from the artist's POV might yield more fruitful information than being bored with logic exercises I already know well.

I find it pretty awesome that many Indy game developers take the challenge of software development and artistic creativity with equal precedence. Most people are either one or the other, left or right brained. It is definitely a well rounded person that can do both well.

To the point, what would you recommend for a 20 year software professional well versed at high to low level development, interested in learning from game development?
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sunsetbrew
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Re: Game development

Post by sunsetbrew »

To be more specific about my interest. One of the greatest challenges in advanced architectures is communicating the design effectively. Although, any good design is composed of trivial logical components, the composition of the components still requires effective visualization to share the high level perspective. Powerpoint sucks at communicating anything more than marketing buzz words. UML is very helpful, but still not effective in multi-dimensional system design. I want to bring that to a new level.

I have some secondary objectives as well. But in general, the idea of creating real-time visualizations is both challenging and interesting from many perspectives and use cases. It seems like the gaming industry has made leaps and bounds on creating efficient (smoke and mirrors) visualizations and most importantly made it accessible to people with a wide variety of skill sets. That is a crazy insane big deal.
Grabthehoopka
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Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 12:16 pm

Re: Game development

Post by Grabthehoopka »

An admirable goal; I hate powerpoint.

As Albert Einstein said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
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Stefan8000
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Re: Game development

Post by Stefan8000 »

Just my personal opinion, but i think, the Developer Diaries part of this forum should stay for developer diaries only. Maybe, we can discuss your very interesting post in another place? That would be really nice.
Last edited by Stefan8000 on Mon Oct 14, 2013 4:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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sunsetbrew
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Re: Game development

Post by sunsetbrew »

If a mod wants to delete or move the thread, it would be fine by me.
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matt
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Re: Game development

Post by matt »

Perhaps it should go in a different thread, but since I am still learning how to administer phpBB, I think it can stay here for now.

That is a VERY good question. When I was still in college, I was working on some research projects about using the game based environment for visualizing data. Games are amazingly effective at communicating a large amount of information to their players, so it seems like that aspect could be adapted to communicate data in general.

It definitely is a challenging topic though since I'm not sure anyone has really adapted the knowledge of games to general data visualization. Perhaps looking into things about game HUD and UI design? I think the real strength for games is the interactivity. You can play around with things to understand how they behave. You can explore the world and push and poke things to see how they behave.

That is making sound like I am proposing that SGI's File System Navigator used famously in Jurassic Park was a "good interface", which is far from true, but perhaps there is some way to add interactivity to software diagrams that could help.Trying to communicate software system design is extremely difficult, so I don't have any concrete ideas about how to do that well.

I hope this helps!
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
Grabthehoopka
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Re: Game development

Post by Grabthehoopka »

I remember reading some stuff a while ago (can't remember where unfortunately) about some people trying to make a game out of early school. There have been studies that show the effectiveness of kids absorbing information and learning concepts by turning it into a game, so they want to make a game that would encapsulate the entire curriculum for a first grade class, and then another for 2nd grade, and 3rd grade, and so on.
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