Articles by Bryan

How to Make A VR Game With the impressive rise of things like Oculus Rift and other headsets from VR companies, virtual reality gaming may well be a large cornerstone of gaming in the near future. You may be interested in trying your hand at becoming a VR developer. Go through our guide to get […]

As games become more realistic, we are blurring the line between fantasy and reality. With each passing year, we see more and more impressive displays of graphical prowess. This is helped along in part by bump mapping. This is the graphical technique of making objects appear to have their own distinctive features, (when they really […]

Introduction to 2D Animation Some of the best games in video game history have been 2D: Early Final Fantasy titles; The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past; Castlevania, and more. It’s only natural that you would want to take part in this legendary and beloved gaming tradition. And now you can! With the […]

Character Sprites What Is A Character Sprite? A character sprite is a simple 2D video game graphic included as part of a broader environment. For example, The characters in Final Fantasy VI, The Legend of Zelda, Pokemon Red, and Castlevania are all sprites. They are 2D bitmaps included in the overall game world and move […]

Do You Need Substance Painter? If you are an artist of any stripe, Substance Painter can be an amazingly useful tool. Substance Painter focuses mostly on painting textures onto models. Substance Painter ups the ante on painting assets than you would normally get in other programs like those in the Adobe Suite of programs. If […]

What Makes A Game A Game? We play games all the time, but are we all intimately familiar with the core concepts of game elements and mechanics that make up our favorite titles? The very concept of a game is a form of play, structured to entertain, educate, or kill time. Lately, games have often […]

Picture it: you are in the middle of creating the game of your dreams. Everything seems to be going well, but you can’t for the life of you figure out how to have players save their game progress. If you are anything like us, you compulsively save after every significant game event, (and sometimes create […]

What is Games ‘User Experience’ (UX) …and How Does It Help? When you boot up your computer, click on your browser of choice and begin scrolling through social media, what sticks in your mind? Is it incremental new features? The colors? Is the app or website you are using easy on the eyes? All of […]

While playing classic games like Minecraft can be visually stimulating, the lengths to which someone can spice up the graphics are impressive. For Lord of the Rings fans out there, people used mods and texture packs to create a life-sized replica of the Mines of Moria, a staggeringly large underground environment seen in the franchise. […]

When choosing a game engine, the future game developer must pick something that works for them. Are you more into big-budget blockbusters with brain-busting action and a bevy of brilliant visuals? Maybe choose something with impressive horsepower like the Unreal Engine. However, if you are just starting out, there are quite a few options to […]

Game development used to seem like a far-fetched idea that only big studios could undertake. What if you wanted to create your own game, according to your rules? Furthermore, what if you wanted to share your awesome new game with a bunch of other like-minded gamers and game developers? There’s some good news: the Roblox […]

What Is a Game Loop? The game loop refers to the overall flow of the game program. It is referred to as a ‘loop,’ as the program keeps looping infinitely until manually stopped. As you can probably imagine, there is a ton of variety in game loops and which games loop in specific frames per […]

Overview What Are Shaders in Games? When you see the term ‘shader’ about a video game, it’s a program used to render different pixels. Shaders in games are used when detailing shadows, lighting, texture gradients, and more. However, they can do a lot more than just their namesake. You can often see shaders being packaged […]

What is Deferred Rendering? Deferred rendering is when rendering isn’t part of the first part of the animation pipeline, saving it instead for the very end. Think of post-production effects in movies added after filming. Deferred rendering offers valuable opportunities for animators, as it can cut down the amount of needlessly complicated work by a […]

You can probably picture it: a cold, dark night. A violent thunderstorm has taken out the power, and you and your friends are forced to make your own fun without the aid of electronics. This is where the reliable backbone of entertainment comes in: board games. Whether it’s chess or Settlers of Catan, board games […]

While playing any type of game, you will come across thousands of different players. If you play Call of Duty, you will undoubtedly find a player who takes everything seriously and plays by the rules. Likewise, you might find a player who acts more malevolently, trying to skew the game results in their favor by […]

SFX and VFX: What’s the Difference? Purpose of Special Effects They are there to illustrate to the audience the creator’s intention of creating a different world in which fantastic things can happen. This is done through various things like simulated weather, complex animatronic beasts, or grisly, gory effects in a horror movie. Visual Effects in […]

What kind of math is used in computer programming? While programming itself doesn’t need the programmer actually to engage in hard mathematics, there are quite a few different branches of math included in the essence of computer programming. Basic programming math, algebra, and trigonometry are the most common strains of math for programming. However, it […]

You’ve probably heard the term ‘Green Screen’ quite a lot, and you’re probably somewhat familiar with what it is; a flat, green fabric placed in the background that you can impose an image on. Interestingly, ‘green screen’ is actually a bit of a misnomer, as the whole process itself is called ‘Chroma Key Compositing’ or […]