Game Design: Theory & Practice- P20

Game Design: Theory & Practice- P20: My earliest recollection of playing a computer game was when I stumbled upon ahalf-height Space Invaders at a tiny Mexican restaurant in my hometown. I was perhapssix, and Space Invaders was certainly the most marvelous thing I had everseen, at least next to LegoLand.
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Game Design: Theory & Practice- P20548 Glossary Beta: The state games reach after passing through Alpha, and the last step before a game is published or otherwise released to the public. In Beta, changes made to a game are supposed to be strictly limited to bug fixes. Some developers define Beta to be when they first have what they consider to be a release candidate. See also Alpha and Release Candidate. Bible: Used in the gaming industry to refer to various reference materials used during a game’s development. See Art Bible and Story Bible. Boss Monster: An enemy in a game, though not necessarily a “monster” per se, which is much larger or simply more difficult to defeat than the other opponents in the game. Typically boss monsters are placed at the end of levels and provide a climax for Y that level’s gameplay. FL ’Bot: Short for “robot,” this refers to artificial intelligence agents that are designed to appear to play similarly to humans, typically designed to work in first-person shooter death-match games. Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament both feature ’bots as the AM player’s only opposition in the single-player game. BSP: Short for Binary Space Partition. A method for storing and rendering 3D space which involves dividing the world into a tree of space partitions, most famously used in TE id Software’s games Doom and Quake. Builder Games: One term used to describe games in which the player is responsible for building lasting structures in the game-world. In a sense, in builder games, the play- ers are responsible for the level design. Examples of this type of game are SimCity, Civilization, RollerCoaster Tycoon, and The Sims. Burn Rate: The amount of money a company, typically a developer, spends in a month to keep itself in business. This typically includes all of the employees’ salaries, rent, utilities, and other persistent expenses. Sometimes publishers will try to fund a developer only to the extent of its burn rate, so that the developer does not have any spare cash and remains forever beholden to the publisher. Candidate: See Release Candidate. Capture the Flag: A game involving two teams, both of which have a flag. The flag is kept at a specific location and possibly guarded, while the players on both teams try to grab the other team’s flag through stealth or brute force. In computer games, this is often a game variant offered in first-person shooter multi-player cooperative games, such as Quake or Unreal. Choke-Point: A point in a game past which a player can progress only by passing through a particular area, completing a particular puzzle, or defeating a particular mon- ster. Often the areas preceding and following a choke-point allow the player more freedom of play, while the choke-point presents a task the player absolutely must accomplish before proceeding. Team-Fly® Glossary 549Classic Arcade Game: Does not necessarily mean a game that is a classic, but anygame which was released during the early period of arcade games or which exhibits thetraits typical of those games. Classic arcade games include simple, single-screen-playergames such as Space Invaders, Centipede, Robotron 2084, or Pac-Man. Classic arcadegame is defined more fully in Chapter 4. See also Arcade Game.Code: When used in reference to games, code is the lines of text that programmersenter into the computer and which the computer then compiles into the functionalgame. A talented programmer is sometimes referred to as a code-jockey.Color: Beyond the obvious definition, in terms of game design this may also refer tothe specific content and setting of a game. Monopoly, for instance, includes the streetnames of Atlantic City and a depression era real-estate mogul theme as a means of pro-viding color. Color is separate from the gameplay itself.Concept Document: Also known as a pitch document. This is a short document thatincludes text and concept sketches and that is used to initially sell the idea of a projectto a publisher or other financier. A concept document gives the reader an idea of whatthe game will involve without including sufficient detail to actually develop the game.If accepted, the concept document is usually expanded into the design document.Concept Sketch: A sketch of a particular game art asset which is used to show some-one what the art will look like, approximately, before that graphic or model is actuallycreated. May also be a sketch of a scene from the game as it will appear once the gameis functional.Creative Services: A deceptively titled wing of the publisher which is typically incharge of creating the box art and other advertisements and logos for a game.Critical Path: The path that the player is expected and encouraged to follow whenmoving through a game or a particular level. Somewhat reminiscent of the yellow brickroad in The Wizard of Oz.CRPG: A computer version of a role-playing game. See also Role-Playing Game.CTF: Typically refers to Capture the Flag multi-player games, though it may alsorefer to Valve Software’s Classic Team Fortress game. See Capture the Flag.Cut-Scene: A non-interactive portion of a game typically used to communicate to theplayer information about the game’s story line, sometimes involving pre-rendered orlive action full-motion video, other times using the game’s real-time graphics engine.Cut-scenes often come between levels in a game, and are sometimes used as rewardsfor the player having finished a ...