The FutureSkills Digital Games Development Study Pack for the Virtual New Students Day 2020

GAMES DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

GAMES DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

Design & Create New Worlds!

Welcome to the exciting and engaging world of Games Design & Development. Careers include; Games Developer, Games Designer, 3D Animator, Games Engine Developer and more.

This Study Pack is to help you with your transition to college from school and give you a taste of what there is waiting for you at FutureSkills.

The activities here are typical of what students will be tasked with in college – See if you can complete all of the challenges!

Challenge 1: 2D Games Design To begin the challenges, we are going to give you 2 Games Design tasks – 1 2D and the other 3D. For this, you can use any software package you are most comfortable with. See how you go!

Scenario: A popular RPG game developer is looking to recruit up and coming talent to help produce 2D game assets for their latest fantasy game. These could be environmental assets, characters, or in-game items. To get the job, you will be placed in a competition with other ambitious Games Designers For the first stage of the competition you are required to: • Produce a list of possible assets.

• Produce a mood board of the assets you intend to make. (link here with examples) • Produce an overall justification of your assets. o How do these assets fit into a fantasy game genre? o How do they relate to level design / gameplay? o What were your design choices / inspirations?

• Produce some initial sketches of these assets. (These can be rough) • Present this work in a PowerPoint format ready to show to the developers.

For the second stage of the competition you are required to: • Use your initial sketches to produce 2D images of your chosen assets.

• Edit these images into a collage with a suitable background.

• Reflect on what you have produced.

Here are some examples to get you started:

Challenge 2: 3D Games Design Scenario: You have done well with your 2D work. As a consequence, you have been entered into the next stage of the competition – The 3D Challenge!

This is a similar challenge – but you must select a different Game theme. You will still be producing game assets – this time 3D These could be environmental assets or in-game items.

For the first stage of the competition you are required to: • Produce a list of possible assets.

• Produce a mood board of the assets you intend to make.

• Produce an overall justification of your assets. o How do these assets fit into your Game concept. o How do they relate to level design / gameplay? o What were your design choices / inspirations? o Categorize your assets in terms of difficulty to produce.

• Produce some initial sketches / blueprints / texture swatches for these assets.

• Present this work in a PowerPoint format ready to show to the developers.

For the second stage of the competition you are required to: • Use your initial sketches to produce 3D models of your chosen assets.

• Texture these assets.

• Render these assets in order to highlight their quality.

• Reflect on what you have produced.

Here are some examples to get you started:

Free online 3D Software Packages you could use; https://www.sketchup.com/ https://www.tinkercad.com/ https://www.3dslash.net/index.php

Challenge 3: Fortnite Encryption & Decoding!

A key skill requirement of all Games Developers is to be able to Program and Code games to make them different or better than before – Part of this is to be able to decode and encrypt – because you may find yourself working with other developer’s code – This is where it begins!

Try these Fortnite decoding tasks and see how quickly you can complete them – Extension Task: Develop your own Decoding task on a Game theme of your choice – and see if friends can complete it

Challenge 4: Name That Game Genre This is a good test of your observation skills and memory. A good games designer will have a broad knowledge of different games and the Genres they belong to.

Go through the well-known game’s images below, give their name and the Genre they belong to.

Game Image:

4

Game Name & Genre:

Game Image:

Game Name & Genre:

Challenge 5: How Good is Your Games Knowledge?

To complete the Skills Set Games Challenge, we will set you a task to see just how many consoles you know and when they were released – To go with the consoles, we have added some more wellestablished games, again, just to test your memory – See how many you get

Picture

NAME THAT CONSOLE Name of Picture computer/console & Year of Release

Name of computer/console & Year of Release

ZX Spectrum

NAME THAT GAME Picture

Name of Game

Picture

Name of Game

Trips, Visits & Employer Engagement at FutureSkills Whilst studying at FutureSkills, you will have lots of opportunities to participate in trips and visits to enhance your experience and enable a greater awareness of what career you would like to pursue. Key to this are our industry partners who visit FutureSkills regularly.

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