Articles by Bryan

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I will never forget the day that I saw my young cousin glued to his iPad, playing Angry Birds. We were on vacation and my family was begging him to put the iPad down and join in the family fun. But he would not be swayed; he felt the call of the birds. That was […]