DAVE School consistently produces skilled graduates who are uniquely prepared for industry positions. Skip to content Game Production. Home Programs Game Production. Award Type Diploma. Duration 12 months. Credits Program Starts Programs begin 4 times per year. Duration 32 months. Program Starts Programs begin 6 times per year.
Overview Game production is predominantly about imagining and building entire worlds and their inhabitants from scratch and devising immersive experiences that can run and adapt to the demands of user play in real-time. This is easier said than done; the temptation to squeeze in a new mechanic can come from everywhere at any time — say a weekend gaming session. However, adding a new mechanic or changing an existing mechanic mid-production, can be incredibly risky and wasteful.
Hundreds of previously created assets might need to be thrown away to account for the changes. As an example, imagine adding the ability to fly to an action RPG game, some of the levels and encounters might become trivial and require a complete rework, existing 3d models might also need improvements as the artists did not expect the camera to see the top of certain objects.
Production typically ends at a predefined date, usually to make sure the game is out before a financially important event. A few studios might be willing to keep production rolling until a certain level of quality is attained, but this is not the norm. Usually, the publisher and developer will decide the needed polish can be applied to a reduced team and move to Alpha testing, and thus, post-production.
In this phase, most of the development team starts to leave and QA steps in. The objective is to polish the game and make it as stable and bug-free as possible. The game at Alpha testing is called feature complete, all the game mechanics are locked down, but designers can still tune values and artists improve or create new assets.
QA and the engineers start to hunt bugs proactively. As the game becomes more stable the leads begin to lock down entire sections of the game; the game enters Beta testing when all the game content is locked down. In Beta, the development team is only allowed to fix bugs and optimize assets and code for performance.
QA has the final say whether the game is ready to be shipped, this decision is based on the type and number of bugs remaining. No pathway map option has been selected. Please select from the pathway map options listed above. Course Sequence total credits may differ from the program information located on the MCCCD curriculum website due to program and system design. At Maricopa, we strive to provide you with accurate and current information about our degree and certificate offerings.
Due to the dynamic nature of the curriculum process, course and program information is subject to change. As a result, the course list associated with this degree or certificate on this site does not represent a contract, nor does it guarantee course availability. If you are interested in pursuing this degree or certificate, we encourage you to meet with an advisor to discuss the requirements at your college for the appropriate catalog year.
The pathway map presented above is for the current catalog year and is the intended pathway map for new students. All previous catalog years for this pathway map are available at the link below.
Skip to main content. Maricopa Emergency Management System Alert. Field of Interest. Computer and Information Technology. Academic Plan. Academic Plan Code. Total Credits Required. Catalog Year. Effective term. Students must earn a grade of C or better for all courses required within the program. Students interested in transferring should meet with an Academic, Faculty, or Program Director. What You'll Learn. This pathway map will help you gain the expertise needed to: Analyze the electronic game industry, including history, markets, distribution, publishing channels, business models, team roles, and career landscape.
Analyze commonly used game components and mechanics. Manage game development project resources, budgets, goals, and tasks. The library more often than not is something that has already been created for the company for use with all its games and is updated and constantly updated and tweaked in order to meet any new goals or expectations for the development of newer titles. Many times the library team will be required to write its own custom programming code, often based in the C programming language, which will be the base of all the company's games.
There will also be a set of programmers responsible for creating the game's 2D or 3D engine, which is an application that generates all of the polygons, textures, lighting, and special effects that you see in the game, often using what's been delivered by the art staff.
The AI is yet another important element of the game's software code and it's generally written by an individual AI programmer or a team of AI programmers. They work on all of the physics, collisions, interactions, and movement of every single character and object in the game. They write the routines that specifically define what happens when a character interacts with other characters with objects and how the controllable characters respond to the game player's input on the control device.
They write the logic that make the characters and objects all act as per designed in the design document. Once all of the base elements have been implemented by both the artists and programmers, the production team will then work on trying to optimize all the aspects of the game to get it to run well on the hardware being developed for. Decisions will have to be made as to whether to reduce polygon counts on objects or characters or eliminate or add new lighting or special effects in order to get the game running at a frame rate that's deemed acceptable by the development team.
In some cases, a company will do whatever it can in order to keep the game running at a constant 60 frames per second by sacrificing visual effects or polygonal counts or just my optimizing the models, textures, and AI codes to the fullest, while others are willing to sacrifice a consistent frame rate to throw in as much eye candy as they can muster.
Phase 4: Post-Production The final stage of a game's development is the post-production stage. This begins when the game is considered "feature complete" and all of the code has been written and art has been completed. This is when an alpha version of the game is created and is supplied to the game's test department to bang away at and find bugs and major flaws in the game that need to be changed whether by the artists or programmers.
One all of the bugs and major flaws are identified and addressed, a beta version of the game is then produced and once again sent to the test department to be picked through with a fine tooth comb. This is where the hardcore testing is done and every single bug regardless of how major or minor is documented and attempted to be fixed, with the major "A" type bugs the top priority with the "B's", "C's" and less important bugs addressed as time or company policy may dictate.
When developing a title for any of the consoles by companies such as Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony, this is also the stage where the testers must make sure that the game abides by all of the "standards" that are determined by the manufacturer of console that must be followed in order for the game to be approved for release. It includes things such as the "B" button always having to be used to back out of menus on games developed for the Microsoft Xbox and the "A" button always having to be used to advance.
Once all of the bugs have been fixed and all of the standards have been determined to be met, a final version of the game is made and, in the case of the consoles, is sent to the console maker to get tested and approved for release on the system in question.
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