Quali sono alcuni argomenti non ovvi da imparare per lo sviluppo del gioco? [chiuso]

Scrivo giochi da circa 10 anni (da QBasic a C # e tutto il resto). Devo iniziare ad estendere le mie abilità in diverse aree. Quali sono altri argomenti sorprendenti che dovrei leggere?

Gli argomenti previsti includeranno i soliti sospetti:

• Linguaggio di programmazione a scelta
• Linguaggio di scripting
• Controllo della fonte
• Gestione del progetto (o Agile)
• API grafica
• Forse un po 'di AI (un * percorso di ricerca?)
• Fisica (fisica dei proiettili)
• Test unitari (test automatizzati)

Sto cercando argomenti più esoterici ; cose che non ti aspetti di dover sapere, ma se le conosci, fanno la differenza. Ciò potrebbe includere cose come:

• Abilità artistiche (disegno, illuminazione, colorazione, layout, ecc.)
• Elaborazione del linguaggio naturale
• La fisica del suono (onde sonore, effetto doppler, ecc.)

Personalmente, ritengo che avere le capacità tecniche tecniche (ad es. In grado di realizzare opere d'arte decenti se riesci solo a trovare idee; o, seguendo i tutorial di Photoshop / GIMP) è stato il più vantaggioso per me.

Questa non è una domanda aperta ; Sto cercando competenze specifiche che ti abbiano aiutato e ti aspetti che continueranno a trarre beneficio a breve e lungo termine.

Story Telling - people and critics always say story is important in games. It's often added as an addendum to a list of things your game should have, but actually implementing a compelling narrative in a game is hard. Games narratives get put into the context of literature or movies often, yet they fundamentally function differently and there is a lot of interesting discussion around about how to even talk about game narrative on its own terms. This gets even more abstract for games that don't use 'characters' or are basically an assembly of mechanics.

Given all that, literary and film analysis can be useful to be able to phrase intent.

Marketing - so you've actually finished a game (haha, as if). Now what? We hear about Minecraft or Angry Birds, but the business side of actually promoting and distributing our game is, for many of us, a giant black box. XNA? Sure, put it on XBLIG, but what else can be done to promote it?

Psychology - Specifically, how do we learn? How can you teach game mechanics through game play so that people aren't totally lost by your esoteric opus on time manipulation?

Graphic Design - Sure we all know that using Papyrus or Comic Sans is bad, but creating a well designed menus system or UI requires skill. This is only partially a subset of art skills, not necessarily an complete subset - some people can be good designers without being able to draw well.

Having a firm grasp of world mythology and religious iconography is always good for game design. HCI and other bits of human factors psych are important just about everywhere. Being able to think like an engineer and deconstruct complex systems into smaller units is useful not just as a programmer, but also when trying to see how other games are built. Game developers tend to be a very diverse bunch, so almost any field of expertise can be used to make better games.

I am surprised that no one mentioned maths yet. I cannot for the life of me understand how you can be a good game developer without being good at maths.

I have seen game developers stuck with algorithm or optimisation problems, or simply writing very bad or underperforming code, because they used convolutions without knowing what an integral was, or did not know that a convolution was separable if the rank of its matrix was one, or that a composition of linear maps was linear, that the slope of a curve was related to the derivative of its function, that interpolating using 3*t^3-2*t^2 instead of t ensured slope continuity. I have seen them sum 50 values of sin(x) to approximate an area instead of using an integral. If x was supposed to grow to A*x in 10 seconds, they would set it at A/10*x after 1 second instead of exp(log(A)/10))*x. This is only what I can think of right now, but I could probably come up with dozens more of such examples.

Seriously, learn maths.

History - So many successful games are based off of either true history, or adapations of it. Some of the Call of Duty series, and the Assassin's Creed series come to mind.

Common sense - Yes, having something completely which implements perfectly realistic sound waves travelling through the air is nice and all that, but the user is going to struggle to see the difference. Oh, and run the game on a PC with less than a dozen GHz worth of processor power.

Immersion Is actually a term still being defined and discovered. What makes us immersed? Why do some people get easily immersed while others won't even flinch when playing Dead Space 2 in a dark room with loud sounds?

This subject alone has helped me a lot as it involves many psychological aspects that are great to have in mind when designing and developing games.

• What in your game will actually move your player emotionally? Make use of narrative immersion!

• How can you make your player stay in his or her immersion "bubble"? Make use of tactile immersion!

• What will make your player focused and think of nothing but the current challenge in your game? Make use of strategic immersion!

Check out these links for more interesting insights in to the subject:

Wikipedia article

Oldie but goldie

Economics

Principles learned in economics are very useful in many parts of game development. I'm not only talking about money either; economic principles apply to decisions players make about about everything from whether or not to pick up the health pack to choosing which path to take, and thus knowing economic principles can help make your game designs much stronger.

Usability. Designing a good and intuitive UI is actually quite hard, ensuring that all the info the player needs is nicely laid-out on-screen, that it doesn't obstruct the action or eat into available screen real-estate, that it's obvious when it needs to be but doesn't detract from the main scene, that the correct options are exposed in the menus, etc - that's not easy at all and takes lots of time, testing, and iterations to get right. Basic usability lessons can be picked up from almost any program, and it's well worth investing time to get right.

Input. This one is vitally important, and kinda ties in with usability. The graphics are the sexy stuff that people like looking at, sound gives important cues and clues, but input is the player's primary interface with the game so you'd better have really good input code. Getting a bunch of ultra-competitive multiplayer fans to road-test your engine can be quite illuminating here, not to mention humbling. You very quickly find out where your input glitches, quirks and lack of responsiveness lies.