Introduction to Game Development for the first GameLab lesson (06/04/2017 @ PiCampus)

1. Introduction to
Game Development
By Gaetano Bonofiglio
gaetano.bonofiglio@gmail.com

2. What’s a video game?
A video game is an electronic game that involves
interaction with a user interface to generate visual
feedback on a video device such as a TV screen or
computer monitor.

3. What’s a video game?
• Difference from other software: user entertainment

4. What’s a video game?
• Difference from movies: user interaction

5. What’s a video game?

6. How do we develop games?

7. Game development got it all!
business
art
Science
and tech
Video game
development

8. And may be difficult…
gameplay
sfx
scripts
engine
shaders
gui
light maps
models
animations
vfx
story
voiceovers
soundtrack
post-processing
multiplayer
testing
microservices
encryption
clustering
marketing

9. … But also rewarding
First week revenue
The Dark Knight
239 million $
Grand Theft Auto IV
500 million $
Source: video game industry trends by Alex Ferrara

10. … But also rewarding
Careers in game development:
• Producer
• Project manager
• Game tester
• Game designer
• Level designer
• Writer
• Programmer
• GUI Developer
• Specialized developer (networking, AI, etc)
• Art director
• 2D/3D artist
• Musician
And many more…

11. Game industry has grown
Pong (1972)
Classics
(Atari, NES,
SNES, etc…)
Doom (1993)
CPU powered
3D games
(1995)
Unreal Engine and GPU
powered 3D games (1998)

12. Game industry has grown
Source: video game industry trends by Alex Ferrara

13. So what do we do? We can write Pong in assembly…

14. … Or use tools!

15. • Graphic editor based on
proprietary drag & drop
• Engine for 2d games
• Game Maker Language
(GML)

16. • Graphic editor
• Engine for 3d games
• C++ and blueprints
• 5% royalty based on gross
revenue

17. • Graphic editor based on
drag & drop
• Engine for 3d games
• C++ and blueprints

18. • Graphic editor
• Engine for 2d & 3d games
• C# and JavaScript (kind of)
• Free with premium options

19. Engines can’t do everything, be creative!

20. Life tip: don’t do «spaghetti code»

21. Life tip: and refactor a lot

22. What is GameLab?
• The aim of GameLab is to spread knowledge about game
development and fields connected to it (graphics, game design,
storytelling, scripting) to members of any level of experience.
• During the seminars we will follow a small game project from start
to end, teaching the basics of game development.
• Please share with us your feedback!

23. Thank you for your attention!