Depending on how you look at it, video game development is one big pile of deception. From invisible walls and trigger zones to graphical manipulations, the best games make the most of all sorts of tricks to grant the illusion of what’s happening.
Not to imply that’s a bad thing. Finding clever ways to manipulate the player experience means richer gameplay and more fun. It also means better graphics to enjoy. To help everyone best appreciate all the work developers go into making a good game, I’ve outlined some of the most common development tricks in the industry.
8The Rain Box
Let’s kick things off with the one in the title. Rain is one of the most complicated aspects of computer rendering.Millions of tiny water particles falling dynamicallycan be difficult to simulate. So… they don’t.
The rain box is a term often used to describe a small area that simulates rain, typically a box positioned around the camera. Because when the camera is inside the rain box, they’re surrounded by the rain effect, which makes it look like everywhere is raining. It’s not perfect for visual accuracy, but it saves on processing power.
7Input Buffering
Have you ever noticed that, depending on the fighting game you’re playing, your character tends not to perform all the attacks you input? Odds are, it’s because you’ve grown accustomed to an input buffer.
In some games, if you press the attack button before your last attack is done, nothing happens. Butwhen input buffering is included, it will ‘queue’ up the attack to happen immediately after the current attack is finished. This way, you get instant follow-up strikes that require less perfect button timing.
Be careful, though. If you grow accustomed to the input buffer, you will find yourself struggling with games that don’t have it.
6Bump Maps
Look at that brick wall or that tree bark. Looks so detailed, right? Ever wondered how they can get such detail into the cracks, crevices, and corners? The answer? They don’t! In truth, that brick wall is perfectly flat, but they give the illusion of texture using a bump map.
In short, when a texture is applied to a surface, developers can also apply a bump map. This is a grayscale image with the texture pattern on it. The computer then knows to use that image to determine which parts of the object to make ‘bumpy’ when rendering. The result is a much more detailed-looking wall at a fraction of the processing power.
5Hit Boxes
Game characters are super detailed, but their ‘real’ form is anything but. When interacting with the world, objects don’t use the part you see to determine when they’re touching or not; they use hit boxes. That’s why you may sometimes be hit by an attack that doesn’t look like it would have touched you. It missed the character model, but still hit the hit box.
These are invisible, simple shapes that follow the object or character to help provide clean and accurate collisions. For platformers, your entire character might be represented by a single box; for fighting games, this might be a series of size-specific boxes to ensure accuracy.
4Just Barely Surviving Health Bar
Have you ever noticed that when playing intense action games like Doom and BioShock, you manage to just barely get through a tough encounter? Well, in truth, you SHOULD have died.
A common trick to give a sense of stakes and intensity is to have the last bits of your health actually matter more. For some games, this means having ‘more’ health in the last ten percent of your health bar, for others, it means having a small bit of invulnerability in what would have otherwise been a killing blow. It keeps you alive longer, and you get through more fights thinking it was a tough one.
3Shaders
Does something look cool? Then it’s a shader. This is a catch-all term used to describe when some visual effect is rendered with code instead of polygons or textures. Ocean waves, sun beams, grainy camera footage, and cel shading are all a shader.
Because it’s code-based, shaders allow for more dynamic and interactive visual effects, and it can be whatever the programmer decides, making this one a hard one to pin down. Even so, it’s a key component to making a visually stunning game.
2Baked Lighting
Lighting has gone through some amazing improvements over the last several years. Before everything was dynamic and ray-traced, baked lighting was a popular method of having realistic lighting without so much processing power.
Instead of lights being rendered in real time, the developers would tell the computer what they wanted from the lighting. It would then take a LONG time to render it to the highest quality. Once it did that, though, they could input that information into the game, pre-rendered, allowing for high-quality lighting visuals with almost no additional processing power.
1Random Number Generator
Saving the king for last! Introducing RNG, or Random Number Generator. We see RNG in almost anywhere randomization is present, from dice blocks in Mario Party to critical hit chance in Final Fantasy. But despite being a major part of most games, it’s also fake.
You see, computers are incapable of being truly random. They simulate the idea with RNG. They take an existing number, like the current millisecond, and run that through a formula to get the ‘random’ number. The process is usually impossible to predict, so it’s effectively random to humans.
Some games let you influence the RNG by choosing what the initial number is. This is usually called a “seed” since it’s the start of the randomization formula.
