The analysis of Red Dead Redemption

The analysis of Red Dead Redemption

This article will be critically and thoroughly dissecting and trawling through everything that Red dead redemption has to offer as a game.

Analysis
The first thing we can look at is the cosmetics of the game starting off with the graphics.



Graphics
For the time of release red dead's graphics where exceptionally beautiful and where definitely something to boast about, with hundreds of beautiful remote desert locations with the off chance of finding a small cluster of settlements or maybe a small town filled with beautiful buildings and scenery surrounding it all. the art style for this game is obviously very realistic with everything looking so incredible and vast blending everything so well together. Obviously as time goes by games eventually end up ageing, some more than others, but i find that with red dead the graphics still definitely stand up to there age considering that the game is already seven years old! Finding a game that old with this good graphics even to this day is incredibly hard.



Sound
The sounds of Red dead Redemption are very fitting to everything they are attributed to, all of the sounds of the guns for example sound how i imagine a lot of old timey guns would of sounded back then with most of them sounding not very good or not very loud fitting with the not very good/working guns they had at the time. another example would be with the horses in the game which you use to ride and get about from place to place, mounting a horse will make it neigh or hitting it to make it go faster will also make it neigh, along with the sounds of the hooves on different kind of terrains, a louder clop on hardened pavements and a lesser thud when galloping on dry desert floor. leaving a horse stationary or tying it up will make it casually release air through it's nose as a sign of relief after a hefty journey.

Another very important thing to mention when talking about sound in a game is obviously the music in it. and when it comes to the music in red dead it's outstanding. Different places in the world having different soundtracks like roaming through the desert to some soft calming ballad or walking into a tavern only to be overcome by people talking and a person on the piano belting out a upbeat tune. similarly getting into a sudden fight you may have come across while randomly roaming or going to collect a bounty and a fast paced epic tune comes on while you engage in the shootout of a life time. everything in terms of music flows so well together to make an epic tapestry of sound.

Construction of Content
What exactly is Red dead Redemption then? It's an open world sandbox game which consists of a main over arching story with little side missions and story's that lead off of the main plot or even have nothing to do with the main story but are there for some extra fun. The time of the game is set is in the 1911 mid western era with cowboys and bandits running wild. you take control of John Marsten a vigilante cowboy seeking revenge on an old gang that left him for dead. this consists of doing missions and objectives all over the world containing endless different things to do for people. mainly killing rival gangs/people to obtain something someone wants, collecting more weapons to add to your arsenal for more future fights with people. aside from the main campaign there is an online feature to that comes with the game, this consists of different game modes like death match or capture the flag, being pitted against another team fighting for the win.

Codes and Conventions
Comparing Red dead Redemption to a lot of other games in its genre there is quite a lot of similarities and differences, the big difference being the time period in which it is set. pretty much the only game in the sandbox genre to attempt this feet, with maybe crackdown being a close rival but crackdown is set in the future instead of the past like red dead is. i wouldn't say red dead pioneer anything for the third person sandbox genre or even the action adventure one, but it definitely shook things up in terms of sandbox games setting. even incorporating things typically not used within the sandbox genre, for instance the bullet time mechanic of slowing down time and being able to line up a good shot certainly isn't unique (Fallout 3) but was very good to mix in this with jut normal gun fighting and a cover system for picking off enemies one at a time. another comparison with most sandbox games, especially Rockstars other work like GTA for example Red dead includes a health regeneration system where whenever the player is injured by something like a bullet hiding away from enemies and not getting damaged for a certain amount of time slowly gains back all of your health creating a need for the cover and bullet time mechanics within the game itself

Narrative structure

Red dead redemption is set in the mid 1911's western world, with technological advances like automobiles and high powered pistols mixing with the horses and Winchesters is a brilliant mix of post and pre-technological boom of the industrial era. this is a very common theme throughout the whole story of Red dead mixing the old with the new. taking control of John Marsten you are picked up by the local FBI type individuals who task John to hunt down and kill all the members of his former gang, if achieving this John will be granted diplomatic immunity and will be allowed to live out his life normally. John then sets out to find the first person he can think of, Bill Williamson, upon arriving at Williamson's hideout John is then shot and left for dead just outside of Bills hideout. he is then found by Bonnie Mcfarlane a local rancher from a nearby village and takes john back to help him heal up and get his strength back. Once John is awake and well you set out on your adventure to kill his old gang members.

John has his life and all of his family's lives at stake with bargaining with the law, if john doesn't catch and kill all of his old gang members he will be locked up and may never see his family ever again, never being able to achieve his dream of living his life with his family out in the middle of nowhere living of the land. While john is on his adventure he comes across a lot of various funny and profound characters from all around america. One of his ex gang members is actually hiding out in mexico so, with the help from a few others travels to mexico to find him. Towards the end of the film John is faced with one of the officers of the FBI type people, he warns John that even though he is fine now with the FBI they will just find a new monster to hunt down after he's done with his ex gang members, this is foreboding towards the end of the story.


The outcome of all of this is John is actually successful in hunting down all his ex gang members, John returns to his farm with his family to seemingly live out his whole life there. One day all of Johns family are going about there business when a whole gang of government lawmen come racing towards Johns house. A massive shootout ensues with the result of Johns uncle being killed in the gunfire. John and his family run and take refuge in a nearby barn, John then tells his family to go without him and leave them all for John to handle, he then proceeds to open the barn doors where the player is able to enter dead eye mode and try and kill as many officers as possible, but it turns out there are way to many people for John to handle and ends up getting killed by them. It then skips to 1914 and you see Johns son Jack standing over his dads and now mothers grave.
 
Obviously this leaves a giant impact on Jacks life with his mother dying of old age and his dad getting gunned down by the people he was helping. Jack is filled with revenge, an optional side quest allows you to hunt down Edger Ross the man who led the cavalry of men to Johns house and killing him. the official ending of the game is when Jack finds Ross fishing out in the middle of nowhere and challenges him to a quick draw battle, if Jack wins the credits roll revealing the actual ending to the game.

Representation of character

The way John is presented in the game is very stereotypical of an average protagonist in a spaghetti western film, especially his story of being an ex gang member and having to hunt down and kill each one of them. although John describes his old gang as being very nefarious with killings and robberies being frequent practice for them, Despite this John is made to be a bad guy gone good, proving this more by killing his old gang members, wanting so desperately to return to his family and live out the rest of his life a good man. You can really relate to Johns struggle with him doing the right thing the whole game, just to eventually be gunned down by the same people you where supposedly helping.

Johns son Jack is portrayed as loyal son who helps around the farm and house while John is away. When Jack becomes an adult i think the player is personified through Jack, a good man with a hate-filled revenge for the man who killed his dad. Obviously this is extremely relate-able for the player because you have played Johns story the whole time up until the bitter end, making you want to also take revenge on Ross. When Jack becomes an adult he pretty much becomes John in a way, meaning that he also becomes a stereotypical over the top spaghetti western type character in his own way.

Next would be Bonnie Macfarlane, The women who helps John recover from his near death experience. Unlike John and Jack, Bonnie isn't a very stereo-typical character as she is the one that is helping John, not the other way around. She defeats the generic video game stereotype of a damsel in distress as she can hold her own fairly well against everyone. Especially when gun fighting with criminals alongside John himself. Obviously it goes without saying but Bonnies character is most definitely a good person first for obviously helping john but also for being a hard working normal citizen throughout the village she lives in.

Defining the target audience/demographic

The age rating on Red Dead Redemption is in fact mature, this means that the game is only suitable for 18 years and older.

Understand how media audiences respond to media products

The positive and negatives of Violence in video games and the media.

A lot can be said about violence in video games and the way the media like to portray it in there own light, adding there own spin or reflection on the matter.

Positives and negative to do with Gaming:

There are many good and bad sides of the gaming world, different things need to be taken into account and a different perspective is needed to look at some aspects of gaming. today i am going to be talking about the impact of computer games and there roll that they have on society as a whole.

Negatives:

Excess playing
First of all i will be talking about the concerns of excess game time and the impact it can have on your life. there are a lot of downsides to excess play time on computer games and some of these go hand in hand with some other things i will be presenting on this list, one example is that from playing too long you could loose sleep from playing a game all day and all night, this can be a multitude of reasons as to why but i think many people can become addicted to the game they are playing, a quote from here says this "International studies have shown that between seven and 11 per cent of gamers show some symptoms associated with addiction." this shows us that quite a few kids are addicted to some type of video game, and a lack of sleep can lead to a lot of problems such as: fatigue, lack of rational thought, hard to make clear decisions and feeling depressed.

social isolation
Next is social isolation, this is quite common among video game addicts as they lack social skills that most non game addicted children/teenagers have, this can be caused by playing too much computer games and not socialising with friends/family outside of the games. Yes you can socialize with other people around the world in a video game but it can only go so far, as most of the time the players are talking about the game and trying to team up to complete the objective. another reason why kids can be become isolated from society is that the kids become attached to the game because they have a companionship with the game as it fills the roll of friends. a great example of this is World Of Warcraft, this game is meant to be played for a very long period of time and most people can find themselves becoming addicted to it.

cost
thirdly is the cost of video games, not necessarily the overall cost of the physical game itself but also the toll it takes on your life. on example of this is a subscription based game like Runescape, costing around 7 pounds a month, now this may not seem like a lot at the time but this can add up, especially if you have been playing Runescape for a very long time. another example is the cost of sleep that the gamer will experience, as i previously mentioned in excess playing which i think i summed up enough.

Separation from reality
Lots of games set your player in a fantasy world,a world quite different from our own, this is fundamental for some games roles, but it does h

elp kids get addicted to video games making them want to live there lives in this world instead of their own, as they may be bullied in real life or have a terrible home life and so to substitute for this they play online games. doing this is quite dangerous and the child could later on find it hard to distinguish themselves from the fantasy world and there real lives. one example of this is joshua J nimm who was a boy who shot himself while reenacting a scene from his favorite game halo. the full story can be found

Now moving onto the Positives of gaming which include:

Hand eye coordination/Brain training
Now we are moving on to some of the benefits of games starting off with hand eye coordination and brain training in games. Some games offer to help brain training with actual games like Brain Training on the Nintendo DS. but most games offer some type of brain training exercise and or hand eye coordination exercise. for example puzzle games offer a lot of help with problem solving and offer a good learning curve for young children and teens, most games like first person shooter offer hand eye coordination for example if you where using a sniper you would have to be very accurate with it and develope a lot in this sector.

Thinking and strategy skills
Next is thinking and strategy skills, these can be seen in top down real time strategy games like for example Starcraft or Warcraft, in these games you normal take control of a unit to destroy/take over an enemies territory to win the objective. these games require an immense amount of thinking and strategy skills to out wit and flank the enemy team, especially if you are playing online against someone who is playing the game more than you are and therefore has more experience than you do. research done by the queen mary university of london have done an experiment in which participants either play one of two games, the sims or starcraft. here is a direct quote from the findings which can be found here, "Findings showed that subjects who played "StarCraft" were quicker and more accurate in performing cognitive flexibility tasks than those who played "The Sims.".

Future impact
But what is to come for gaming of the future and the impacts it may bring? who knows, but we can hazard a good guess. with games becoming more philosophical and more in depth i believe that they will be accepted more as an art for by the newer generation than just a silly console or past time by the older generation. games may even be used to help surgeons for training on very hard to do operations. one example of this can be found here. the website shows a study in which surgeons where recorded before and after playing video games while performing laparoscopic surgerys. "Overall the 33 participants scored 33% better on a skill test called Top Gun. Participants that played more than 3 hours a week scored 42% better.".

(all of the points above can be found on my blog here)

Hypodermic needle theory.

I think the hypodermic needle theory in terms of games like manhunt are completely skewed by the media in terms of the long lasting effects that video games have on society, specifically violent video games. in this video here a scientist regulated areas of the brain active when participating in playing a violent video game compared to watching acts of violence in real life. whats interesting is that he found that two areas of the brain both lit up during the experiments, these parts of the brain being emotions towards the people in the video/video game. but surprisingly when it came to the person playing the video game there was a separate part of the brain that was also active. this part of the brain was actively blocking the receptors that where showing remorse for the person, indicating that the brain knew that the violence on screen wasn't real providing very strong evidence that video games in fact do not have have negative connotations when it comes to the mind.

Object Oriented design for computer games

Concepts and principles: simplified understanding; re-usability; maintenance; efficiency; real-world modelling; collaboration and sharing; communication; quality assurance


Simplified understanding: This basically means the simplified version of things created in your game, for example when making a blueprint adding notes onto them to show what each step does or at least tries to do with it.


Re-usability: Re-usability in games design tends to mean reusable game assets. for example tree's and plants are reused a lot when making a game, or even characters in the game are reused a lot as well. obviously every tree in a game cannot be unique because that would take so much time, so instead the game developers simply create a handful of tree designs and sprinkle them throughout the level giving the illusion of a forest with each tree being unique.


Maintenance: When it comes to maintenance, it's more to do with the upkeep of someones work than actual effort put into the work. for example when you're making a level within a game, you would have to make sure to go back and check that everything is working as well as it could be. without doing this you would have a poor quality game overall and when you hand it over to the people in charge of quality assurance.


Efficiency: Efficiency and work ethic kind of go hand in hand in terms of creating something within a group of people, you will always be given a certain time frame for creating something, obviously not the whole project but a certain specific aspect of it, for example texturing a model for someone. that person can't wait forever for the person to texture it because then they would get no where. which links into what i will be mentioning soon.


Real-world modelling: Talking about


Collaboration, sharing & Communication: When working in a group for a big project you need to constantly be working with each other to get the overall vision of the final product. this can be done by talking to everyone and collaborating together on something like modelling a character or getting the layout of a certain level within the game. relaying these visuals to the people working on this and sharing with them the design helps them go on and layer more things onto the product helping everyone in the chain keep the project running smoothly.


Quality Assurance: Like i said in maintenance, quality assurance is the task of making sure that your game is up to scratch with the objective given. and also that any immediate/damaging bugs haven been weeded out before the final product is shipped out to sell.

Game objects

Sprites: Game sprites are more to do with 2D games design, these includes basically everything visual on the screen. These could be anything from the characters themselves to the background of the level.

Characters: Characters within the game are the people you will see within the game, for example like an enemy that you have to fight or an ally helping you within combat, or your actual character that you are playing within the game.


Weapons: The weapons and characters in the game kind of go well together as in these two things interact very well with eachother, for example an enemy in a game could use a gun to try and shoot your player and then your character that you play as could use a sword for example to defend himself against his attacker.


Rooms/Walls/Scenery: A level or a "room" in a game is an area usually designed for the player to interact in with other characters/objects. normally all the rooms in a game make up the whole thing, leading from to another typically with loading screens in between each room to load the next one seamlessly. within these rooms you could have some walls and scenery within theme, definitely scenery but walls are optional as it could be a level outside in the open where you would just have scenery and a sky box.

Instances: Instances are essentially game objects given specific rules within a game, these can be copies of another object, copied, and placed anywhere within the game creating things like walls and scenery with there own variables that can be changed at any time

Rewards: Rewards are pretty self explanatory in itself, these are rewards for the player for defeating a tough enemy, doing a crazy task, or just simply progressing through the game. for example an achievement system giving you some kind of title to show to your friends to show off.

Object Properties:

Most of the things within the whole realm of Object Properties are pretty self explanatory again, so i will be summing them all up within one section to keep it short and simple but still explaining them.

All Object properties essentially are are how objects/players/AI, behave/look within the game itself. for example the first one being colours within the game. first of obviously scenes within the game have colour like walls and such differentiating them from the floor or another object within the room itself. but can also have different and more subtle connotations, for example in most games where you have a HUD you will see your life bar/health somewhere. this is normally coloured green, this is pretty significant within most games like this. and when you are damaged this life bar with change colour to maybe amber/yellow when you are or near half health and red when you are quite low on life. maybe even red/blood splatters on your screen like within any call of duty game ever.

 next is size and speed which i think kind of go hand in hand together. first of the size of an object is normally trying to make all the things in the game to scale of real life, this is pretty normal within most games. but this can also go for things like characters within games. for example World of Warcraft or most MMO's/RPG's you will find that most boss' you will encounter within those games will be larger than your character normally. this could be a final boss or any boss for that matter in the game. these bosses also have a different speed normally to your character, for example like in dark souls when you encounter a big boss there speed of there attacks/movement is normally rather slow telegraphing there attacks for quite a long time. obviously, movement is included in there with both speed and size, but more prominently within stealth games, as your movement as the character within those games are rewarding to be slow with your movement. like for example in most Metal Gear Solid games.

As a separate paragraph to colour/health topic is lives within a game. lives can actually tell you quite a bit about a game. usually within modern 3D games lives isn't really a thing anymore because it has pretty much become redundant. dying in a modern 3D game normally places you at the last checkpoint you where previously at. but with 2D retro/new games you will have (normally) 3 lives to begin when you start the game. increasing when you collect them within levels and decreasing until you die. and losing all your lives reset the game to the beginning, this is very prevalent within obviously Super Mario Bros.

Actions and Events:

the first thing to do with events is mouse and keyboard events, these are pretty simple to understand. when you move your mouse within a FPS game? of course you move your aim/vision around. this is classed as an event, the event tells the game that when the mouse is moved in a certain direction the players view needs to move with it. Another example is in a game like space invaders using the arrow keys/buttons this will move the direction of the ship in the corresponding direction. another example is in World of Warcraft again pressing any of the number buttons will make your character perform an action/attack. and thats essentially it. Next is the create event, like the previous space invader example, pressing the fire button/key will create an instance of a bullet that will fire towards the enemy ship and in World of Warcraft pressing the buttons will create an attack/spell.

Collision occurs whenever a player interects with a solid object keeping the player from passing through and beyond the object. this is most commonly used within wall objects in a level keep the player from falling out the level.

Timer events within a game are triggers throughout a level triggering whenever a certain action or time is reached, for example within a game when you beat a stage a door will open after a certain criteria/time is met.

Scoring is another self explanatory one, this is simply a score within a game normally followed with a leaderboard sharing your score with others allowing you to show your friends or compete for the top score.

Inheritance

Parent in terms of inheritance is the base or the core of the whole system of inheritance itself.

Child is the object or class that takes on the properties of the parent, kind of like an eco system feeding it down the chain. the child will be the one with the properties that can be changed into different actions, allowing new objects to do different types of things within a game. this can also be coupled with Overriding events which overrides the childs behaviour and modifies it slightly to do different tasks within the game.

3D modelling

3D Model Assignment

The first step for making the model was setting up the reference frames for the model. this was done by using the polygon plane tool as its just simply a flat square making it easy to stretch to my specifications which fit the reference image, after this was done it looked like this.

following this i created a simple polygon cube and made it fit the width of the side view and of the front view aligning them up with the front and side perspective cameras accordingly.

After this i selected the face option with holding right click, and only selected the top face of the cube, with this highlighted i used the extrude tool to add another section on the torso, once i did this i used the scale tool by hitting R and moved the torso out to fill the body out my when it came to the chest/neck area. repeating the process until it gave me this.

when i was happy with the spacing and everything i changed to the side view perspective and holding right click selected vertex's and while highlighting the second from top row of  vertex's and the row near the hips shaped and filled them out to fit the side view and give the torso more shape and width.

the next tool i used was the insert edge loop tool, this tool essentially allows you to split a polygon up any which way you like, in this case i put an edge loop straight down the centre of the torso to help with the legs later on with the model

All of the tools I've described here: Scale, move, extrude and edge loop, Are the tools mostly used throughout the making of the model. with this being said i'm going to move onto when the next tool was used because as stated above those tools are used for the majority of the models creation. with the legs being created and the forearm created we will move onto the hands, a very intricate part of the models creation because you're working with smaller parts being added onto a bigger piece.

The tool in question is the extract tool, which will come up again a lot when it comes to texturing the model. with one of the fingers modelled i can use this one finger to create all other fingers on the models hand. (Excluding the thumb which by this point has already been created but with it being a thumb is very different to the other fingers.) Once i had the fingers faces selected i used the extract tool pretty much severing the finger from the hand, allowing me to easily copying and pasting this 3 more times for the other fingers

after doing this obviously comes the task of attaching these fingers to the hand once again. which brings us onto our next tool which is the append to polygon tool. Before this though, the fingers must be combined with the hand for this tool to work properly. this can be done by going into the mesh tab and selecting combine, while having the fingers and the hand both highlighted. after this we can use the append to polygon tool, selecting on edge of the finger and selecting an edge of the hand where the finger is meant to start it creates a bridge between the two connecting them together.

with all this being said and done those where all the tools that where used to make the model. then is the task of texturing the model, which was first started by extracting most of the models appendages (feet, arms legs, head, ect.) and planar projecting all of these things, making the projecting on the Z axis. after that i had to go to each extracted appendage and unwrapping the UV of the model. This was done by selecting certain edges of the arm for example and cutting it so the UV can be unwrapped making it easier for adding a texture. below is an image of an unwrapped arm UV.

sometimes, for the arm and torso mainly, the UV needed to be pinned when unfolding, this is done to help the UV unwrap in a less complicated and jumbled manor. this was done by holding right click and selecting UV and highlighting certain UV's and in the UV editor selecting unwrap with pin selected UV's enabled.

after the UV was unfolded i used the UV snapshot tool to take a picture of the UV and save it for myself, with this i am able to import the picture into any graphic design software of choice, i used photoshop and simply painted on a texture to the UV making estimated guesses as to where abouts on the UV it would place on the model creating an arm, hand and torso texture using the UV snapshot.

Evaluation:

Personally i would like to say that i feel okay about my model, i'm happy with how the overall model looks, but i would of liked to have textured all of the model and used more proper textures or of even made my own textures rather than just painting them on in Photoshop. but overall i would say im happy with the model itself.

I had my friend Jack evaluate my model as well and he said as follows: "its super, good looking model, but the texture could be better, its pretty sub par but if it was a proper texture it would be fine."

Making the 3D environment for the game.

The birds eye and face on view of my 3D environment for the game.

I started off with the top down angle of the game and i started this by filling the page green to represent the grass in the level.

After this i added the roads into the level by just grey rectangles and adding white lines to represent real roads with these markings on them.

Next i added the clown tent and a few buildings next to the road, the clown tent is obviously where the player is going to go into when the game starts and all of the buildings are there to make the Environment more immersive for the player making them feel like its an actual town.

after this i added a large brown building to act as a kind of factory of sorts and a few more houses to fill up the empty space in the bottom right of the screen to make it more believable as a town. after that i added a car in the middle of the road to add a sense of dread because this indicates the town being empty from people fleeing the killer klowns. 

Next is the face on view which is the view as if you where standing within this city itself, i started this out like the top down view of just a simple green grass colour but added a split just above the centre and filled it blue to represent the sky above.

after this i added a road with the white lines getting smaller and smaller towards the end giving you a sense of depth when viewing the picture as if it is leading off over a hill

Following this i added the clown tent to the side of the view giving you a full view of the thing you will be entering and hopefully returning out of.

After this i added a building to the right of the tent for one of the many houses along the street and made the windows and door broken to emphasise even more to the fact that this once possibly filled town is now completely empty and void of people leaving there house and all there possessions behind them. and with all that done i was complete and satisfied with my work. 

Ideas for the clown game

Plan for mine and Jacks Unreal Engine game

Genre of the game:

The genre of the clown game will definitely be a first person shooter game as we are going to be killing killer clowns, this could mean being killed with any object or gun we can think up of. for example some of the clowns could have foreign objects like baseball bats or some clown related item and be picked up by the player and used against them if the player runs out of ammo for example or just wants to mix up the gun fight game play with something a little more different and unique.

Levels Within the game:

I think the first level of the game will be the player outside at night standing near a, what seems to be, an abandoned circus tent, the player then enters the circus tent to find that its actually bigger on the inside than the outside and is trapped inside. from here the player has to navigate around the twisted circus tent killing anything that comes in his path and trying to survive all of the demented killer clowns chasing after him. i think there will be multiple levels within the game itself as you progress further into the clown tent bringing up different encounters with clowns and even harder to kill bigger boss like clowns maybe at the end of all the levels.

Character Models:

One of the main character models for the game will obviously be a killer clown obviously along with the boss(s) of the game on different levels to the game. at the start of the game there will be weaker/smaller zombies you have to defeat, towards the end increasing in size and strength/health. and different designs for the bosses in the game like a scarier one for the boss gradually leading up to a final boss.

Equipment:

the equipment in the game will consist of a variety of weapons/items to choose from. for example weapons for the clowns themselves in the game and obviously weapons for your character to use on the clowns. We thought of adding in melee weapons for some of the clowns at the start of the game so melee weapons might be added for the extra dynamic of the game, making it easier for the player earlier on in the game and gradually ramp up the difficultly getting towards the end of the level meaning the enemies weapons are going to be a lot more threatening/harmful like getting guns, and then even bigger guns and eventually coming to a mini boss or just a really hard enemy with a huge gun/melee weapon that causes a massive amount of damage making the fight harder for the player to complete the level.

Other equipment could be for example power ups or items to help the player in the level, more than likely a medi-kit for the player to use to regain some health in game just to make sure the game isn't impossible to beat and just hard enough for first time players of the game.

game engines

List of games engines

1. Source Engine

The source engine is the engine used by the game creating company and steam platform creator Valve. the company behind a variety of games such as: Half life, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Portal Ect. The source engine is provides the user with the source SDK (Software Development Kit) meaning they could create levels or even models but they could only be used within source games and not actually used to create games of there own. So Source is semi open source providing the user with some tools for game editing and model viewing/shaping but nothing more.

2. Frostbite Engine

Frostbite is a game engine developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE), the creators of the Battlefield series. This games engine is made to create games for: Windows, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox 1. Frostbite is also not an open source software and the rights being owned by EA/Dice meaning that if you wanted to create a game with the frostbite engine you would need to work for EA/Dice themselves. Although they have not ruled out the speculation of releasing mod tools for there game like the source engine. The main aspect of the frostbite engine is the beautiful scenery and enviroment you can create within the engine itself.

3. Unity

Just like the last two game engines this one is again cross platform, meaning games can be made for various consoles, PC's, Web browser games and even phone games. The most popular of the three being mobile games as unity stands out as the monopoly of the phone game engine giant. being the runner up in the Phone game awards hosted by Apple Mac OS X Graphics category just a year after Unitys official commercial launch. Unity has gone through many iterations just like the last two game engines, Unity is now at Unity 5 started from just the standard Unity. Unlike both of the game engines before Unity is completely open source meaning that you can create and publish a game using unity completely for free. And even more unlike most open source engines unity does not take royalties for the game or charge you for publishing one meaning you can make 100% of the profit from your game you made.

4. Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE)

The RAGE engine is an engine developed by Rockstar Games which incorporates different technologies within its own engine like The open source physics system BULLET and Euphoria Character animation engine. Rockstar is the company that owns this game engine and unlike unity and source is not open source meaning you can only use it if you work for Rockstar. The company itself are the creators of such titles as Grand Theft Auto, Man Hunt, Red Dead Redemption Ect. Like most of the others also Rage is made to make games for such platforms as: WIndows, Ps3, Ps4, Xbox 360, Xbox 1, Nintendo Wii. The game engine itself DirectX11 and stereoscopic 3D rendering on the PC platform.