Trends of Game Development

There are so many developments in games lately and in the past few years and just as there are that, there are many trends and developments that are akin to a scientist having the freedom to do what ever they way. In a way that scares me as much as what I see from reading. I am a woman, what real chance do I have in a male dominated industry where big breasted woman are the main 'female' characters?

Nada, zero, zip, nothing. That's how I feel when I read these articles about current developments. As gamers and future developers we need to pay attention to not only our imaginary worlds but also to the real world and its trends. So in saying this, I consider the most important thing for the future to be open source or SDK development. If you do a search on the net for free SDK you will find a dozen different ones to play with and enjoy.

Unreal released their game engine for free download with a clause that you can use it fully but when you start to make money, there will be a certain percentage taken out after the first 50k. For a developer, 50K might not be a lot but with a engine that birthed UT03, Borderlands and Gears of War how can anyone go wrong? And they are not the only ones. Valve has one, CryEngine has one and there are many others. I haven't looked closely at the others because I was already super impressed with Unreal's engine to begin.

Allowing developers, those underdogs, a chance to use a top engine to create a game will bring new light into the industry. Whether it is a first person shooter or a RPG, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that there are dreamers out there wanting to see their dreams made into reality even if its on a TV or monitor. Its the ideas created that keeps the industry running, not the new fabrications that arrive though they help keep things impressive.

A development we should all see coming out soon is the impressive Oculus Rift 3d headset. I can't help but think that VR is not just a sci-fi thing anymore(Holo Deck anyone?) but also a path we have just started on. Think of all that came out of sci-fi story. Star Wars, Star Trek... both have given those dreamers ideas to step towards and finally someone, through current tech, has realized the potential of VR using relatively inexpensive parts.

While this has been around since motion  pictures at least, 3d was too expensive to make it something public. But it will be here within a year or so, it won't be pretty at first, it won't be smooth but it will be here and I can not see any reason for it to up and disappear at all. People want more reality in gaming, they want to see games just as we all see real life. That takes hardware, software and talent to get to this point. As they say, our future is here and now.

 Resources:

Poh, Michael(2013) Future of Gaming: 5 Exciting Emerging Trends http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/future-of-gaming/

The tech that gave PC's a foothold in gaming - In the Beginning...

Tech being as it is and was, there's been some very unique advancements that drove games from being console only into the PC which I favor so much that I'm dancing! With Nintendo being the big dog back in the late 80's and early 90's it was hard for anything to compete with them. They were the masters and we all were the slaves, just throwing money at them happily. So what was the advancements that changed this all?

First you had Creative Labs, back in 1989 they came out with the much loved, very first Sound Blaster card. It was advance for the time frame and had 8-bit mono and C/MS which was still a bit of a step up from consoles at that point. What Creative also did was give it all the support that people needed which made it very popular. A+ there! They kept improving it and I have to say, till the Z series,  which I have now, I loved them all. This Z series sucks plainly right now. I wont go into it.

Next was 3d graphics. The first game to use it and use it well was Doom. But if you look back, it was the advent of OpenGL that caused 3d graphics to boom. Silicon Graphics(SGI) focused on 3d computer graphics and created IRIS GL. Because it was such a proprietary item other companies were closing in on them. What they did was clean IRIS up and release it as OpenGL to the public. And to this day its still the standard that it was back in the early 90s.

The last that comes to mind is shareware  Andrew Fluegleman and Jim Knopf can be named the father of shareware but Apogee took it a bit further with games. You have a bit of a taste and then boom, pay for the rest. id Software separated Wolfenstein 3-D into 3 sections, Apogee tossed out the first part, in essence, for free, left you wanting more and gave you all the information you needed to get the rest. The next year, they(id Software) basically did the same with Doom and as they say... the rest is history.

Now consoles are scrambling to keep up with PCs and failing because of key components. CD-ROMs were a recent addition to consoles. Better graphics cards, recent and still behind addition to consoles. Games. That's a wide open debate because the feel of games going from console to PC is really odd. Its the controllers that caused it. Mouse is a lot smoother than controllers when playing which is why you will never see a open world where any platform can play.