How are video games made?
๐ In short
Behind every video game is a whole team: programmers who write its rules, artists who design its characters, musicians who compose its tunes and writers who invent its story. And at the heart of every game is a magic loop that repeats dozens of times a second without us noticing.
๐คฉ Did you know?
- One of the first famous video games was a simple tennis game from 1972: two paddles and a square ball!
- Hundreds of people work on some big games for several years.
- The sound of characters' footsteps in games is sometimes recorded by walking on gravel and snow in a studio.
- Many programmers started by making little games when they were children.
๐ Find out more
๐ The game loop
Every game repeats three steps without stopping: it reads what you pressed, works out what happens (did the character jump? did it crash?), then draws the new picture. This happens about 60 times a second, so we see smooth movement.
๐ Animation
Movement in a game is still pictures shown one after another very fast, like drawings in a flip book. Each picture is called a โframeโ.
๐ก Rules written with conditions
โIf the hero touches a coin, add a pointโ, โif he falls in the water, start againโ: a game is full of conditions that programmers wrote one by one.
๐ฏ Play smart
Games are fun and some teach thinking and planning, but we choose games suitable for our age, set a time limit, and remember to move about and play with our friends in real life too.
๐งญ Game physics
When a character falls or a ball bounces, that's a calculation the programmer wrote: gravity makes the fall faster every frame, and the wall turns the ball back.
๐ Level design
The designer arranges the levels from easy to hard and places rewards and challenges carefully, so the player learns something new at each stage without getting bored.
๐ See how it works
๐ Key words
- Frame
- One picture in an animation
- The game loop
- Reading buttons, working out, then drawing, over and over
- Level
- One stage of a game
๐งช Try it at home
Design a level of your game on squared paper: draw the hero, coins and obstacles, and write three rules like โif the hero touches water, he goes back to the startโ. Then play it with a pebble and a friend!
๐งฉ Test yourself
1 About how many times a second is a game's picture drawn?
2 What do we call each picture in an animation?