Pre-production techniques for the creative media industry.

Pre-production techniques for the creative media industry.

My game that I am creating with Wayne is a game intended for the smartphone market. The game is about a man named chef who has to try his hardest to get out of the way of an explosion that is coming from the restaurant that he is currently working at, he does this by grabbing a pan and attaching some wheels on it and rolling down a hill with it. The player is awarded points on how far and the tricks the player pulls off. I will now go into detail about the cost of making a game and then finally how much money it would take to make my game.

Finance

Costs:

There would be quite a few costs when it comes to making a game, you need all of your equipment up to date. If you went for the minimum cost of a computer here is what you’d be looking at:

· Windows XP SP3 (32-bit only), Windows Vista, or Windows 7. = £19.95

· 2.0+ GHz processor. = £34.90

· 2 GB system RAM. = £22.99

· SM3-compatible video card. = £100

· 3 GB free hard drive space. = £41.47

This would cost a total of £219, but if you were going for a top of the line PC (which would probably be the wisest move.) you’d be looking at around £500 - £600 and that’s a cheap good build as well. You’d also need these computers for all your employees as well so you’d have to double/triple that figure. And this isn’t even taking in the peripherals of the computer. That would be £120-£150 on top of that.

Another thing to take into consideration also is the program you would use to make your game. Here is a list of the costs of most of the dev kits/programs you would have to pay for:

Dev kits

ID@xbox = free for early access

Ps4 dev kit = $2,500

Software

UDK = free, except for royalties

Unity = free, except for royalties

Game maker = free unless you are paying for the premium which is £149.99

Maya = free for 30 days otherwise £97 a month

The last thing to be said about the cost of actually publishing your game to the company, for steam greenlight this is £70, $5,143 on xbox one and ps4 is free except for royalties.

Funding


Self-finance:

Self-funding is spending your own money that you earn yourself without borrowing or lending money from any other sources. Normally working after hours or taking up a second job just to fund the game. This is an extremely risky choice but if you pull it off the reward is worth it. Obviously the risk of this could be that the game you make is a complete failure and you lose thousands of pounds, or you make pure profit without having to owe any of it out.

Indie funding/crowd funding:

Indie funding or crowd funding is getting a group of people to look at your project and let them decide whether or not to decide to donate money to help fund your game. This can be done in many ways. You could physically go out and ask people to take a look at your game and possibly get a donation. Or the more popular way which would be to go on indiegogo or kickstarter and get people on the internet to help you get funding, this is more of an efficient way because this way a lot more people can see your project instead of just people in your local area.

Grants:


If you were looking to get a grant of a big publishing company you’d have to be very confident about your project and actually have a really good project. People like UDK give grants if they like your project and look into it.

Publisher funding:

This is normally used for triple a games companies and is where the company uses the money they have to fund their own game, this is for games like call of duty, battlefield and the Sims etc. the risks that come with this are if the game is a Failure then the company get the full blame for making it and lose fans, but if it’s not a failure then they get to reap the rewards.

Deadlines:

A deadline is when a piece of work or anything is meant to be in for, this is to get some information in as fast as possible as the person would require it fast. If this deadline is not met you would get into a lot of trouble with your employer or mess up a project completely and set it back a few months on release. Deadlines are the most important thing to keep in mind when making a game because one loose link can mess everything up.

Material:

Using material for a game can be tricky unless you have the know how. www.freesounds.com is a very good website that hosts a plethora of free sounds for you to use in your game without any work. You could always use house hold objects to make sound as well. This is free and easy. Another good website is www.freegameart.com is another good website for free art for your game, for example you need a good forest background for your game, this website can help you out big time.

Codes of practise

To help my game with copyright I have done it on animals which helps as no one has a copyright on naturel. Meaning that all of the enemies in the game and even the end goal (a lily pad) are parts of nature, either an insect or a reptile/animal.

All games in Europe are rated by the pan European game information team or PEGI for short. Again this will help my game as it contains no violence and includes friendly animals which will lower my PEGI rating and open up the doors to a wider audience to buy my game and not exclude anyone.

Unit 78: A1 Understanding Digital Graphics in Computer Games

First game.(Mega man for the NES)

The first game we are going to be looking at is mega man for the Nintendo Entertainment system. the image resolution for this game is pretty bad as the game is in 8 bit. this is a way of storing image information represented as one 8 bit byte. this means there can only be 256 colours on screen at on time. this is because of technical limitations at the time for the NES.

as you can see in the picture the background is very basic stuff, while the player (the person in blue) and the enemies around him are quite complicated. this helps the player differentiate between the both of them. 

The artistic style for this game is very distinguishable as it is pixel art. pixel art is of course associated with either retro games or games that go for a retro artistic style, pixel art is used in many ways for example sprite charts. these are used to make the animations for everything that moves in the game. these images are definitely stored as rasters as the edges of all of the sprites and backgrounds have a kind of blocky edge to them, this is really prevalent in the main character if you look quite closely 

this image i captured shows that the picture is not very intense and there are not a lot of colours on the screen, mainly blue's green's and reds due to the technical limitations at the time of the consoles and the games release. i believe the background of this image would be saved as either a BMP or a jpeg. i'm leaning more towards BMP as this loses less data when compressed but i could be wrong.

Second game (Battlefield 4)

As you can tell from this image already that these are two completely different games. the most obvious difference is that one is a 2d game while the other being a 3d game.

First of lets talk about the artistic style of this image/game. what the developers have obviously gone for is a photo realistic style as most wars games tend to do as it is normally the industry standard, this works very well with this game as i don't think any other artistic style could portray such beautiful scenery without doing it any justice. it also sets the tone for the player playing the game making it way more immersive for them. this is completely different to the other game as it is not at all photo realistic and is in fact the complete opposite.

the image resolution of this picture is definitely very high as you can spot a lot of different things in the image, definitely a high intensity going on in this image. a lot of texture art going on in this scene as well. more than likely saved as something that doesn't lose much if not any data while compressing. this can be said about the background as well. unlike the textures though the background image does in fact appear to be static, completely separate to the area of play. this would also more than likely be saved as a file extension that supports vector images like a PSD, WMF ect. this is also different to the other image as nothing in this image appears to be jagged around the edges everything is very smooth and straight just like a vector image is suppose to be and look like.

the GUI, or the graphical user interface, for this game is very minimalist, i think this is to help immerse the player even more than if it had a massive GUI. as you can see even the GUI looks very sleek and with a great resolution to go with it. with a war game you wont need to have that big of GUI as there is simply no need. a map, health meter and bullet reading is pretty much all you need in terms of GUI needs.