Video game design is undergoing a dramatic shift. It is transforming from a creative pursuit that has a lot of work involved to a creative pursuit where the work is handled by the computer. This is the goal and impetus of game making; to get closer to the creative process, harnessing creativity, while leaving the mundane tasks to the computer. And the computer does this so well.
There are three different realms of game making that I will adventure into. And I will make some exciting predictions as to where we are headed.
The Language of Computers and People
The first realm of game making advancement lies in language. And what I mean by this is that when you are designing a game you have to communicate with a computer. You have to tell it what you want to see in the game and what you want to happen in the game. This began with programmers writing out long lines of code in a programming language. This language was something that took many hundreds of hours to learn. In effect, people had to learn the computers language. But, as computers advanced things changed OKVIP and the Graphical User Interface came into the forefront as a much better means of communication between people and computers. Now you could use your mouse and navigate on the screen to get things done without knowing any computer language at all. And this also applied to game making. Now there are applications that are almost exclusively drag and drop. You can build worlds and insert items, objects, models, and behaviors into the without doing any coding.
Okay, so what is next in the world of language and game making? It lies in the golden fleece of the computer world: “Natural Spoken Language”. Software companies have been chasing after the goal of making computers totally hands free for a long time now. And while there are lots of voice recognitions software programs out there they don’t perform well enough yet. But we keep moving forward and we will get there. And when we do the technology will become an integral part of game making and game design. You