Andrew Dowell

Share the love! I've recently discovered this channel 'Gamedev' after watching way to many videos from 'Extra Credits'. Still it's all about video game design, but has some really cool stuff. These are some tips from their Video Game Designer: Become One in 2018 Check out the full video below: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd_lJ4zSp9wZDNyeKCWUstg Game design is the core of any game experience.   The design team is crucial to the development of any game.   Usually Game Designers spend many years learning all the  necessary  skills.   Make your own games. Find new features and cool game play mechanics.   The risks and rewards of being a Game Designer. Please check out the channel for more great videos. I've learnt a lot in the last few hours and I'm sure you can too!

Making games is fun, rewarding and satisfying. But, getting to a finished product is stressful, expensive and takes a long time. These are some simple things to keep in mind when you start the process. Always have a target market audience in mind. Obviously make the game you want to make but be aware of market trends and and which existing games are doing well. It's always easier to adapt and successful idea than make a new one from scratch. Start small and keep it simple, work out your core game design principle and then build one feature at a time. Create a minimum viable product before you even get into visualization. Prototyping and frequent playtesting is crucial. Make sure each feature is solid and don't get too attached to ideas that keep holding up development. Iterate, adapt or just let them go. Training tutorials and well explained concepts, with feedback loops are important at the start of games but intuitive design can overcome a lot of basic obstacles....

It's interesting to see how some video game designers are switching roles and helping to develop board games. Ever since the very first video game RPG's it was clearly understood that these developers played and referenced D&D. So it seems the more people are coming back to board games, and more of these people want to play games based on videogames. Life really does imitate Art. Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, particularly virtual ones using gamification. Game design creates goals, rules and challenges to define a board game, card game, dice game, casino game, role-playing game, sport, video game, war game or simulation that produces desirable interactions among its participants and, possibly, spectators. Academically, game design is part of game studies, while game...

As one thing finishes, another more exciting thing starts. Making the decision to leave my last job was a tough one and it's taken a few months for me to accept this (and catch up on Netflix and Breath of the Wild). Working in a dream job is a once in a lifetime experience and I learnt a lot, but it is time to use my skills and do the projects that I want to do. Now, I have the fantastic opportunity to workout where that new career path is going. Currently, I know it involves VR, Game design, 3D printing and this studio: Watch this space.

The above is a wonderful example of how great vegetation foliage can look in UE4. The above forest valley scene is by Douglas Davis. The rest of his amazing work can be found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gaQoZ So, this is just a quick one as it's something that I keep having to come back to but strangely not many people know about it. When adding foliage into a scene you often get a strange morphing movement effect. The first reaction is to think the animation or frame rate is to blame, but usually, this is being caused by the temporal anti-aliasing (TAA). This happens when using masked material with vertex animation as the temporal anti-aliasing reuses results from past frames and blends them together It needs a sort of history buffer with anticipation of where it will move next to have fewer artefacts. This can be achieved through the use of motion vectors. Open Project settings, Rendering, and then Optimizations. Find the tick box ...

Building a better experience in VR is an exciting process. Over the years we've found and listened to some great advice and theories about this. As the technology develops and user popularity grows, the need for better interfaces forces us to rethink traditional methods. Two great developers are Michael (designer and prototyper on the Google Daydream team) and Mike Alge with his VR Interface Design Manifesto. (Who also now works for Google) You can check out the full videos below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mcXAMDch7s https://vimeo.com/116101132 This is my collection and research of best practices for User interface in VR. User behaviour is vital when designing an interface. There are many design considerations to consider including traditional graphic design and human evolution. As a user, we all want Premium experiences. this needs to be present in all parts of our product. The title screen and interface design is often the first introd...

Thanks to the Universal Head over at The Esoteric Order of Gamers, I'm hooked on a new tabletop game. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check him out here: https://www.orderofgamers.com/ ...And I haven't even received my rulebook yet, but I'm already building miniatures. So what is this new game, I hear you ask? Gaslands is a tabletop game of post-apocalyptic vehicular mayhem. With fast and cinematic rules, it is designed to be played with toy cars, allowing players to ram, skid and race their way through the wreckage of a burnt-out Earth (or another planet). Gaslands is published by Osprey Games and is easily available on the internet. I got mine at www.bookdepository.com  as they do free shipping worldwide! For more info about the game, check it out here: www.gaslands.com After watching several videos and recently finishing a post apocalyptic VR game at work, I was in the mood to do some physical kit bashing. Although I've been playi...

I recently watched a GDC talk by Mark Rosewater and was amazed how good it was. He is predominantly talking about his experience with Magic the Gathering Card game, but the content can easily be used universally for any type of game. If you have a spare hour to learn some cool stuff, then check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHg99hwQGY Or, if you really want to get into it, then you can read the full article on magic.wizards.com: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-1-2016-05-30 Some of the points I could completely empathize with, and understand from my own experiences that sometimes being better isn't actually being better.  But a lot of them really made me scratch my head and think about game design in a brand new way. I still have a lot to learn. Here are the twenty main points he made. I'm sure this will come in handy in the future when working on the next game project! F...

Volumetric lighting is something I've been using more and more in my projects and slowly, I'm starting to get the hang of it. With each new version of Unreal some interesting updates happen. Unreal Engine recently had a fantastic session at GDC 2018 covering this. Here are the main points. The first thing you'll need to create is a simple Directional Light. This represents the direction of the light from the sun. The Skylight is the indirect lighting that gets caught in the atmosphere. It comes from all directions back into the scene. The Skylight takes a cube map from the skydome image and gives precise richer colors and more light bounces. These can be configured in the World Settings under Num Sky Lighting Bounces. Volumetric lightmaps have replaced the sparse volume lightmap system and now has many more samples and a much larger density. This can be adjusted for larger scenes in the World Settings under Lightmass. Volumetric Lighting Detail Cell ...

Understanding composition is one of the most important things you can learn as an artist.  Arranging the elements in the scene for a visually pleasing and balanced result will not only dramatically improve your work but it also guides the viewer through the image to what's important. Correct visual communication is everything. The 3 stages of Composition: 1. The focal element The image needs an element which helps to draws the viewer in immediately, this is the main thing the view should be looking at. Having too many focus points is as equally bad. This rendering from the Artist Sparth is an excellent example of Saturation and contrast. Other examples can include objects in motion, faces, and figures, guiding lines, framing, vignette and geometric shapes. 2. Structure The organization and arrangement of objects in the scene based upon a set of rules providing order and balance. a. The Rule of thirds is easy to use and any focus objects should be placed around one of the four cir...

Welcome, we made it to 2018. Well done everyone! It's been a roller coaster of a year but it's important to keep pushing and learning. Every day is a school day. Our big project continues to roll on with extensions and the internal-external pressure to do better keeps us on our toes. This week I learnt some great techniques for UE4. First a simple yet satisfying pulse directional material.  This material is designed to be used as an instance. You can pulse any two colours, broken into segments with a positive or negative speed direction. The emissive power will control the brightness and you can copy the black and white texture box below. A great time saver. (black and white texture box) And, finally how to bake complicated materials back down into a simple texture. Ever had that feeling of jaw-dropping disappointment when you open a new material to discover a spaghetti mess of textures and nodes like the one below? Fear no more, it's p...