According to Dan Shefelman, 3-D game design revolves around an important process: creating dimensional assets. This includes objects and environments but also characters.

“A 3-D CG character in gaming or animation is essentially a puppet,” says Shefelman. “Inside that puppet, you’ll find what’s called a rig. The rig is attached to the 3-D mesh defining the puppet’s geometry.”

The animator’s job involves manipulating the parts of a character and creating behaviors for different movements. Shefelman also points out some conceptual parallels between three-dimensional characters and real creatures. “The best way to think of a rig is as a human or animal skeleton. It has bones with joints that fit into sockets, and they can move.”

Shefelman further describes the existence of a hierarchy governing a rig’s joints. “One joint is parented to another. If a joint at the base of a finger moves, a child of that joint, like one at the tip of the same finger, might also move. The joints can also move independently, just like what happens in nature.”

According to Shefelman, modeling on the computer feels similar to working with clay. “You start with some kind of lump,” he says. “In a tool like ZBrush, this takes the form of a sphere. In Maya or 3D Studio Max, you generally begin with a cube. From there, you begin to extrude, or pull, the shapes outward one by one. After pulling out one shape, which we call pulling points, you’ll move on to the next. A typical workflow consists of pulling the points of a polygon and adding more vertices as you build the shape. Or you can focus on pulling complex forms, like a character’s limbs. With either approach, you’ll mold the starting shape into something that becomes your model.”

Animation for film, TV, and linear storytelling is you controlling the character, creating keyframes for the posing, and carefully planning it out.

Animation in gaming is about creating a character or an object that has certain behaviors assigned to it so that it will behave a certain way when you control it.

Animation in the gaming industry takes a cold, dead environment and breathes life into it. Animation is not just how your player moves through the world; it’s also the world interacting back with the player.

People tend to think about the obvious, walking around or dancing, but animation is so much more powerful than that.

For instance, you’ve got an ax that you’re swinging. If you go up to a tree and swing the ax and nothing happens, you’re probably going to think that you can’t knock the tree down. If, instead, the tree wiggles and shakes a little bit, you’re going to swing that ax again.

You feel like you’re engaging with the environment, and the environment starts feeling real. You’re also cluing players into the game mechanics and which actions they can take.

You swing the ax again. This time the tree shakes harder – you’re going to swing it again. You have positive reinforcement that swinging the ax does something, and you should keep doing it until the payoff.

There’s a huge team that works on all these projects within the esports industry. And at every level of gaming education and planning, they have to consider the gaming experience.

A character designer and a modeler work together to create the characters, make them look appealing, scary, or whatever the game requires.

Next, the rigger puts in a rig, a skeleton that goes inside the mesh, the skin of the character, and creates movement. Then, the character receives its texture. Textures give the feel of leather, skin, or cloth, and they create the mood, the sense of danger, or lightness, of comedy.

Animation in gaming is different from animation in television and feature films. Each step in the process must take into account the materials of the objects or characters.

For example, as online gaming education teaches, characters made of metal will move a certain way based upon the characteristics of the metal. A program (coding) will determine how a metal character will interact with its environment.

The environment must be specified as well. Is it metal, wood, or ground? Gravity is also critical; it’s the most important part of physics regarding how a character moves.

If you’re on Jupiter, you’re going to move very slowly. If you’re on Earth, you’re going to move like we’re used to seeing people move. If you’re on the moon, you’re going to move lightly.

All of these details get programmed into the game. Whether it’s an esports, 2D, or 3D game, these things give the character the performance that makes the game exciting.

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Game development has become a very welcoming environment. The game engine is the hub that runs the entire game and makes your game assets work. Anybody can develop a game as there are many different types of game engines and environments available.
If you are an aspiring game developer just starting out, you may want to check out Unreal Engine. This is a popular engine that is good for starters in that it is a bit more user-friendly. Unreal Engine involves less technical aspects to it as compared to other engines.
Another popular game engine that quite a few people know about is Unity. This game engine has a platform that allows you to create game characters. You can also add physics to the game assets using Rigidbody dynamics, and you can make your characters do different things by adding some code to your program.
If you don’t want to install a hefty software application on your computer, there are a whole host of game development engines that are web-based. You would simply go onto an internet browser, type in the URL, and then start coding. Once you’ve created your app or game, you simply download your file.
MIT App Inventory is a form of Scratch, which uses a block-based programming language for you to create apps and games. You drag and drop various blocks to build the code needed to run your creation.
Flowlab is another web-based application. Using Flowlab you can create game characters, add different movements for those characters, and create a full-fledged game. You can also access this application on your phone.
If you start working for first-party studios in the gaming industry, such as PlayStation, Naughty Dog, or Rockstar, you may work with proprietary game engines that these studios have created themselves.

“Some game engines are better for creating great, giant worlds,” says Genevieve Johnson. Unreal was initially known for that, whereas Unity’s metier was smaller, boutique 2D games that could render smoothly on a tablet.
“But what we’re seeing today is that Unity’s excellent for creating large, 3D games. And Unreal can create wonderful games for your phone,” continues Johnson, “It then becomes a question of, how strong are you in coding?”
One thing that Johnson particularly likes about Unreal is its visual scripter.
”I tend towards using Unity as my game engine because I find it to be programmer-friendly. Whenever I have a unique mechanism that I want to work on, I can effortlessly write the code from scratch. That may be more difficult for some people. But to me, it’s very freeing,” says Dan Shimmyo. Unity enables him to try lots of things in a flash.
Malik Forte’s advice to anybody trying to decide between Unreal and Unity is that if you’re looking for accessibility and don’t want to get too deep into learning a code language, then Unreal is the way to go. It’s a lot more accessible and easier to use.
“Unity is for more veteran developers who understand coding language and are further along with working with game engines,” he says.
So, for someone who is just getting started and wants to get an idea of how a video game engine works, according to Forte, Unreal is the way to go to get the hang of things.
“If you want to move on to something bigger like Unity, you can do that later,” says Forte.

Community building is essential when designing your own game. Some designers are great at it. They are going to love us. And they might have loved us as humans. But the minute the game comes out, if it does not engage them, it does not matter.
Drawing a Death – When Community-Building Becomes Excessive
David Jaffe recalls a game he worked on. “Drawing a Death is the biggest failure I’ve ever worked on,” he says. “It was a total crash and burn. I loved it-super proud of it, so proud of the team. Got a couple of good reviews. But mostly, the reviewers hated it. The audience didn’t show up for it-total disaster.” However, Jaffe and his team did great with the community.
So, what went wrong? Jaffe felt they spent too much time community building on drone death. While they were community building, their open and closed betas were not doing well.
But you can put such an emphasis on community that you give it way too much value than it really deserves. Then, it is more lip service. They will say, “oh, community is everything. We listen all the time. We’re here to serve you.” But that is not true. As David Jaffe learned, if you focus too much time on community-building, you can lose sight of how well the game is performing.
Community is Not Just a Two-Way Street
The relationship between customer and designer works when you make what you want, the team wants, and you take appropriate feedback from the community. Pleasing the customer is crucial, but building a successful game is also important. It is not really a two-way street. To keep the relationship healthy, it is more like a 1 1/2 way street.