Video Game Design/Programming/Selecting the Hardware

Selecting the hardware

To develop a game you may need not only qualified personal is special tasks, like graphics designers but you will have also to consider the software for editors (for creating things such as characters, items, scenery) but also the physical hardware to support those tasks, for example graphic tablets may be required for the graphic design, and you will probably need scanners to input hand drawn pictures from artists as well as cameras, cameras could to be used to take pictures of drawn artwork. All these extra costs have to be well considered and depend only on the level of your project.

But hardware considerations are not restricted to the tools you will be using, but most important is the requirement to run your finished product, this will not only affect the target audience but shape the development of the project. The software requirements to implement you game design may require to access large amounts of memory but have a limited amount available to work with at each time the can be also other limitations such weaker CPUs, weaker processor caches or non-default memory alignment requirements.

The easy way out...

No frills, no whistles and no extra costs. If you select a virtual framework, lets say by using Flash as your developing framework you will skip the need to think about and supporting special hardware or setups, you will also have a RAD tool to put your concept into action.

Distribution media

Distribution media is important to determine how much resources can be packed and how they should be packed.

Selecting the Programming Language

Prototyping

A prototype is meant to be an exploration, a journey to see how ideas will play out once they are embodied into a full working program. It is the testing of a new concept that has not been seen before and because of this it must be most flexible in its implementation so it it easy to improve, since the creation of the prototype will inspires completely new ideas. If the exploration of new concepts is not done during the prototyping phase then what was the point of the prototype at all?

Prototyping is meant to be done quickly and then it needs to change even quicker. To be able to do that it as to be maintainable and use a flexible and well-written code base. But keep in mind that a prototype is only useful if it is good enough so to prove your vision as correct and to be discarded for a real implementation; if you spend so much time on the prototype that you start to begging to question its replacement, then you are on the wrong path or have spent too much effort on what should remain the first tryout of the master plan.