Game programming is a challenging and rewarding field that requires a balance of technical skills, artistic vision, and performance optimization. In this article, you will learn some tips and techniques to create visually stunning and performant games that can captivate and engage your players.
One of the most important decisions you will make as a game programmer is which game engine to use. A game engine is a software framework that provides tools and libraries for creating and running games. Different engines have different strengths and weaknesses, such as graphics quality, ease of use, compatibility, and scalability. You should choose an engine that suits your game's genre, style, and platform, as well as your budget and skill level. Some popular game engines include Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, and GameMaker Studio.
Study all the engines in the market and understand how them engine core works, so you will find a suitable engine to your game needs and also the main target players for the platform you want to develop. The most important is not to find an engine that does everything to you (it do not exist) but an engine that is good for you to add new coded libraries and with good compilers!
Selecting a game engine is indeed a pivotal decision in the game development journey, influencing the trajectory and success of your project.
Optimizing your game's assets is crucial to its visual quality and performance. Assets, such as models, textures, sounds, animations, and scripts, can be optimized by reducing their size and complexity while maintaining functionality and fidelity. Utilizing low-poly models and level-of-detail (LOD) techniques, compressing textures and using texture atlases, using audio formats that are compatible with your target platforms while reducing bitrate and sample rate, using animation compression and blending, and code minification and obfuscation are all useful ways to optimize your assets. Doing so will reduce the number of draw calls and memory usage, reduce file size and CPU load of animations, as well as protect the intellectual property of your scripts.
I dont use assets, i do all from scratch and i try to do it optimized by default. Do the official courses of your main engine to learn how the it′s core works for you to optimize it properlly!
Optimizing game assets is a strategic imperative for achieving a harmonious balance between visual excellence and seamless performance. Various asset types, including models, textures, sounds, animations, and scripts, can undergo optimization through several effective techniques:
Lighting and shading are essential for creating realistic and immersive games. Lighting simulates how light interacts with scenes and objects, while shading applies colors and effects to surfaces and materials. These techniques can enhance the mood, atmosphere, and depth of your games, as well as create dynamic and interactive elements. To save computational resources, you can use baked lighting and light probes to pre-compute the lighting of static objects. Dynamic lighting and shadows create realistic and responsive lighting for moving objects and characters. Ambient occlusion and global illumination create soft shadows and indirect lighting effects. Normal maps, bump maps, specular maps, and reflection probes create the illusion of depth and detail on flat surfaces. Finally, post-processing effects such as bloom, motion blur, depth of field, and color grading add polish and style to your games.
Lighting and shading stand as the maestros orchestrating realism and immersion in the symphony of game development. These techniques contribute to the depth, atmosphere, and mood of games, introducing dynamic and interactive elements to captivate players
The final step to create visually stunning and performant games is to test and debug them. This process involves finding and fixing errors and bugs, as well as improving the usability and quality of the game. To ensure your game runs smoothly, looks great, and is fun to play, you can use a profiler to measure performance and resource consumption, a debugger to inspect and modify the state of the game at runtime, a console or log file to output messages, breakpoints and watchpoints to pause the execution of the game at specific points, unit tests and integration tests to verify functionality and compatibility, and beta testers and feedback surveys to collect player opinions.
Testing and debugging form the critical crescendo in the game development symphony, ensuring that visually stunning and performant games emerge from the creative process.