Unit 1: Pre-production Techniques for the Creative Media Industries

Unit 1: Pre-production Techniques for the Creative Media Industries

I will be talking about planning on making a game, the process and cost of making it, and also the strain it puts towards the developers.

The pros, the cons and the reasons for Deadlines

Pros:

Deadline can be useful for marketing. Allowing the people who are working on project to have a timer to complete the finished project. This can also help with marketing efforts, allowing the markets to be more accurate about the date of release. Some mangers of the project would set a “mini deadline” so the team would be more efficient effective at their work. 

URL: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/benefits-deadlines-projects-44815.html

Some project that have deadlines can boost the team’s confidence on making it. This can affect the efficiency of the product and how it was made. This can also allow those who wants to experiment something on the project. This could give them a skill or technique they learned. Sometimes some projects can be bring unexpected challenges, this could be opportunity for a few to tackle. 

URL: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/34579.asp#multiview

When placing deadlines, they usually “mini deadlines”. That will give more structure to game, allowing the team to work smoother in long term of development. This can also give direction to the team when designing the game, having goals to reach, when building to the overall game. This can be great benefit for product and the company. Additionally, when completing the end product, it can give great satisfaction to the developers.

URL: http://teralynpilgrim.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/pros-and-cons-of-deadlines.html

Cons:

Deadline can be all good, but it has negatives. As deadline can cause heavy stress for the people. Overall effecting the finished product. But this can be avoided by having short breaks in-between long periods of working. Also drinking water would refresh the brain. As the body becomes hydrated, some people instead drink caffeine. This great for short term, but negative for long term. The body would be refreshing the body’s cells, and being easier to sleep at night.

 URL: http://www.creativebloq.com/careers/deadline-stress-1232976?page=1 , http://www.creativebloq.com/careers/deadline-stress-1232976

When teams are design or making a product, deadline are usually set. This can cause the project to be rushed because the deadline was too close, or being pressured to make it quickly. This can be due to company that want games to be sold as much as possible. Rather worrying about the product quality. 

URL: http://writedirections.com/setting-personal-deadlines/

When placing deadline and properly planning ahead. This can cause some part of the game to be skipped like a mission, or not adding a certain feature. This can cause an upset with fan-base of the community. Also effecting its selling of the product. 

URL: http://teralynpilgrim.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/pros-and-cons-of-deadlines.html

Facilities:

Facilities managers make sure that buildings and their services meet the needs of the people who work in them. They manage services such as cleaning, security and parking. They also manage building maintenance like heating and air conditioning systems.

Facilities managers are responsible for the management of services and processes that support the core business of an organisation. They ensure that an organisation has the most suitable working environment for its employees and their activities.

Building management (in the UK) is a discipline that comes under the umbrella of facility management. A building manager supervises the hard and soft services of a built structure, ensuring that the security, health and safety, and maintenance of this built structure are in place to a satisfactory level.


This is important for workers to be allowed to work in clean and safe environment. As it is also required by the law to allow them to use the facilities when they need to. The facilities can easily in crease work productivity, or reduce it. If not controlled properly.

Materials:

The materials needed for making a game, is usually a keyboard, monitor, decent spec PC (or dev-console), a mouse, speakers, softwares (like standard Maya, unreal and Photoshop). These are required of building a low-end game.

For high-end games you going to need large amount of man power, sturdy keyboard, high spec PC (or couple of dev-consoles), optical mouse, softwares (like professional Maya, Unreal, premier Photoshop, a good animator tool). This is great for people who interested in starting on a project, and will be working on it for awhile. 

The material required depends on the developers, as it they can be independent studio, or triple A company, or crowd funded game. It can depend mostly on the budget, if it support or even stable enough to go into debt.

Code Of Practice:

A code of practice is a good way to state clearly your organization's position on important subjects like equality, ethics, contracts, conflict of interest and duty of care. Often these matters get overlooked in the process of buying and selling, only to surface later and cause problems because they've not initially been properly explained or understood. Being able to provide a solid and fair code of practice is therefore important in order to establish a clear common understanding of expectations and deliverables between supplier and customer. So if you don't have one, produce one, get it approved, and start using it.

Contributors:

Contributors can be anything from people donating money, being supported by companies and business. Firstly, players are most of the time wanting to donate into the game, allowing them to help out in the game. The second way is, getting companies to make contract with the developers. This can be helpful for new developers to get a good start, but all the time when making a contract they want most of the profit back for supporting the developers at the start.

Finance:

The finance is important part of the developing game. When design, developing, and making it. When making a game, few people would consider the financial cost of design packages, buying a decent computer, and needing a good team. The game would require a small to large of amount of resource and cash (depending the game itself).

Self-Financing:

·         Sell unneeded items that are not used. This will help to start with self-financing.

·         Buy second hand equipment from EBay. This will help to keep the pricing the down quite drastically.

·         Use free software’s, to help keep the budget loss down. Buying games as such of Unreal engine, but they will gain 30% of profit. As you are using their engine.

·         When design something new, but to use Maya as it’s a free software. This will help you from losing any more money from your budget.

Indie Funding:

·         Try to find investors to give you money for you to have a kick-starter with your game.

·         Ask friends and family for cash to get started.

·         Meet other people who are interested in developing a game, in an Indie company.

·         Try and get some fans, and show off a piece of the game. Some fans would be willing to give money to start up.

·         If you can’t get anyone to fund. You can go to bank, to get a bank loan. This can be easy and quick way, but you have to give a reason why to bank. And having a good track record with money.

·         In the UK, indie game developers will receive a Tax Reliefs of up to 25% off. This can help with your budget.

·         Don’t quit your current job, as having to run an indie game company, is risky.

Crowd funding:

·         Crowd funding is when getting individuals to give you a small amounts of money.

·         This can be done by using sites to promote the game, and getting interest of person to give money.

·         Crowd funding can be useful, as it helps the company to get an early start on the stage.

·        If you give them some sort of perk or item in game, this would encourage them to give some money in return.

Publishers:

·         Have an experience in working industries. As publishers hate to take any risks.

·         The publishers will be more likely to sign if you have a good presentation, demo and team. This will be likely to sign you on.

·         Publisher would want to see a return on money for helping game developers to start off.

Grants:

·         Unreal will give grants to those who have experience in making a good game, as well having a strong team. They usually give out about £50k or more, depending on the developers.

·         Creative Europe this have been giving about £109,300 to develop a game.

Software Requirements:

Unity:

For Developers:

CPU: Graphics card with DX9 (shader model 2.0) capabilities. Anything made since 2004 should work.

The rest mostly depends on the complexity of your projects.

Windows 8/8.1 Store Apps / Windows Phone 8/8.1: 64 bit Windows 8.1 Pro and Visual Studio 2013 Update 2+.

WebGL: Mac OS X 10.8+ or Windows 7 SP1+ (64-bit editor only)

Running on Games:

Graphics card: DX9 (shader model 2.0) capabilities; generally everything made since 2004 should work.

CPU: SSE2 instruction set support.

Web player supports IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and others.

Android: OS 2.3.1 or later; ARMv7 (Cortex) CPU or Atom CPU; OpenGL ES 2.0 or later.

WebGL: Desktop version of Firefox, Chrome or Safari

Windows Phone: 8 (available but deprecated for 5.2), 8.1 or later

Windows Store Apps: 8 (available but deprecated for 5.2), 8.1 or later

Supported Platforms:

·        PC

·        Mac OS X

·        iOS

·        Android

UDK:

Unreal Engines get 30% of profit of the game, leaving the other 70% to the publisher.

For Developers:

• Windows 7 64-bit
• 2.0+ GHz multi-core processor
• 8 GB System RAM
• NVIDIA 8000 series or higher graphics card
• Plenty of HDD space

Running on Games:

• Windows XP SP3 (32-bit only) with DirectX 9.0c
• 2GHz or better CPU
• 2+ GB RAM
• A graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support, such as nVidia GeForce 7800

Supported Platforms:

•  PC
•  Mac OS X
•  iOS
•  Android
•  VR 

Game Maker:

Cost:

• First Stage is for FREE
• Second Stage cost is £97.42
• Third Stage cost is £ 519.61

For Developers:

Modern PC running Windows XP, Vista, 7, or later.

A DirectX 9 (or later), and with compatible graphics card with at least 32MB of memory is required for most created games

It requires a screen resolution of at least 1024x768 and 65536 (16-bit) colours (but preferably 32-bit true colour).

For the Player:

• Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8
• 512MB RAM
• 128MB graphics
• Supported on:
• Windows 7 & 8
• Android
• Mac iOS
• VR

Maya:

Cost:

• Professional cost is £149.99
• Master cost is £799.99

For Developers:

Microsoft® Windows® 7 (SP1) and Windows® 8.1 Professional operating system

Apple® Mac OS® X 10.9.5 and 10.10.x operating system

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 6.5 WS operating system

CentOS 6.5 Linux operating system

For The Player:

Issue: This article provides the system requirements for Autodesk® Maya® 2014.

Solution: Autodesk Maya 2014 is supported on the following 64-bit operating systems and at a minimum requires a system with the following 64-bit hardware.

Products: Maya.

Versions: 2014.

Supported on:

• Apple Safari
• Google Chrome
• Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox

 Developer’s Kit and Cost:

Software Cost:

• Android Developer kit is for  FREE
• Apple Developer kit is for FREE
• Microsoft Windows Developer Kit is for FREE

 Hardware Cost for Consoles:

• Sony Developer Kit cost is £2,500
• Xbox Developer kit cost is £5,143

Hardware Cost for PC:

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V3 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor ($249.98 @ SuperBiiz) 
Motherboard: ASRock H97 PRO4 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($86.66 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($54.98 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: XFX Radeon R9 280 3GB Double Dissipation Video Card ($209.99 @ NCIX US) 
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case ($79.99 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: Antec High Current Gamer 620W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($59.99 @ NCIX US) 
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD Writer ($15.98 @ OutletPC) 
Total: £493

Hardware Peripherals Cost:

Monitor: Asus VE278Q 27.0" Monitor, cost is £200-£175
Sound Card: Asus Xonar DX 24-bit 192 KHz Sound Card, cost is £30-£25
Keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K60 Wired Gaming Keyboard, cost is £100-£40
Mouse: Corsair Vengeance M60 Wired Laser Mouse, cost is £40-£50

Video Game Publishers:

• Nitendo
• Ubisoft
• Electronic Arts (EA)
• Sony
• Square Enix
• Microsoft
• Bandi Naco Games
• Activision Blizzard
• Take Two Interactive
• Sega

Roles of Game Developers:

When working in a team, each person is responsible on working, and design. The role game developers.

Lead Designers:

Lead designers are responsible for managing a team of designers and making sure that the game’s overall vision is achieved. They are in-charge of the other developers.

Level Designers:

Level designers are probably the best known of all game designers, and it’s their job to create the level-by-level play in a game. Allowing the player to explore and continue on their game.

Content Designers:

Content designers are involved with the world’s narrative in some way or another. They may write the story, the NPC or PC dialog, the missions and the in-game material to support the story (such as books in a library or writing on a cave’s wall or other historical things).

Game Writers:

Game writers are different from content designers. Content designers may or may not write the text and dialogue for the actual missions they create. They decides of the games story (how it starts and ends).

System Designers:

System designers focus on one particular system within the game, sometimes in conjunction with others. For a fighting game, for instance, a system designer might focus on any one of these systems: avatar creation, fighting, crowd dynamics, training or levelling.

Technical Designers:

Technical designers are part programmer and part designer and are responsible for actually implementing a lot of the gameplay. They are often the middleman, so to speak, between the programming and design departments.

UI Designers / Usability Experts:

The job of the UI designer is to create the interface for the game to make sure the player and the game communicate well with one another. It could go without saying (but it won’t): a good UI designer makes sure that it’s easy for the player to use the game and understand its commands.

Design Director / Creative Director:

This is the boss level of game design – where you are setting the creative course for more than just a single project. You may be setting it for the company or a division of the company.