Queue - November/December 2008

Q

FOCUS

GAME DEVELOPMENT

Better Scripts,

Better

Smarter, more powerful scripting languages will improve game performance while making gameplay development more efficient.

Walker White, Christoph Koch, Johannes Gehrke, and Alan Demers, Cornell University

The video game industry earned $8.85 billion in revenue in 2007, almost as much as movies made at the box office. Much of this revenue was generated by blockbuster titles created by large groups of people. Though large development teams are not unheard of in the software industry, game studios tend to have unique collections of developers. Software engineers make up a relatively small portion of the game development team, while the majority of the team consists of content creators such as artists, musicians, and designers.

CONTENT CREATION IN GAMES

Since content creation is such a major part of game development, game studios spend many resources developing tools to integrate content into their software. For example, entry-level programmers typically make tools to allow artists to manage assets or to allow designers to place challenges and rewards in the game. These tools export information in a format usable by the software engineers, either as auto-generated code or as standardized data files.

This content-creation “pipeline” is not very well understood, and each studio has its own philosophy and set of tools. Many tools are taken from, or developed in coordination with, the film industry. Unlike film, however, games need to be interactive. Player