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Computer games have become extremely popular in the past few years. With new games being launched almost every year world over, the demand seems never ending. Those adept at computer programming, computer aided art and computer hardware are the masterminds to produces these extremely sought after games.

Usually, an interest sparks if you are a passionate about playing games. One may be an expert player, but subsequently gets bored of the games available and there by begins thinking of concepts for new games or means of improvising the already existing games. Taking a computer game design class and ultimately enrolling in a full fledged course for the same are the next steps. At the end of it a new computer game designer is created.

Computer games have become such a technology rage in themselves that schools have begun offering classes in computer game design. The popularity of these classes leads to their getting filled up soon and they can be a bit expensive. I found some great computer information at http://www.mycomputingnews.com. Hundreds of schools, most of them very much techno oriented have come up in order to fulfill the desires of those who wish to learn computer game design. Those who opt for a complete course of computer game design will be exposed initially to concepts like game balance, level design, narrative and storytelling, basic game architecture, motion planning and control.

As a career, it’s not at all simple. Hundreds of different aspects that comprise the computer game design have to be considered. Those aspiring to learn all will learn about the history of computer games, software architecture, animated sprites, sound and music, realism ,challenges, level design, plot pacing, interface techniques, 3D loading , camera control, rule based approaches among many other concepts.

Most fail to understand that designing a computer game is just like writing a technology filled book. A good game needs a good storyline that comprises a plot, characters, narrative, a thrilling begin, middle and end. Also emotion, repercussions and interaction also are a vital part. The domain of computer game design has many challenges for anyone who aspires and decides to master the basics.

Computer game design, has become a profession for many today. The average money one can spin is about $74,900 annually. That’s not bad at all to work on especially when you enjoy it thoroughly. Some computer game designers are able to clinch contracts with big players and make over $100,000 per year. For those who indulge in computer game design as a freelancer can enhance their earnings from a regular job by about $10,000 to $30,000 a year. Hence, in conclusion, computer game design is surely fun filled, challenging and lucrative from every possible perspective.

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Ron often works with: All Communication Information Learn Ecommerce

A career in computer game design the absolute heaven for any hard-core gamer. Isn’t it everyone’s dream to do what they love and get paid for it? And how many of you out there that can show a computer games have had great ideas of how you can improve on the games that you were playing? I know I have, about a million times.

If a career in computer game design is something that you are mulling over and I have good news and I have bad. The good news is that it is a huge industry and is growing year over year. The bad news is that computer game design takes a lot of programming skills which means you had better be a very smart cookie and be prepared to work very hard in school learning the various skills that you will need.

You want to start with a degree in computer science, which is much easier said than done. Of the six friends I had in college that were computer science majors, only one of them stuck with it to the end. It is a grueling major filled with advanced math classes and seemingly endless computer programming exercises.

Some people actually enjoy programming, so if you’re one of them that a career in computer game design would be perfect for you. A real affection for computer games themselves would certainly go a long way as well. My college friend that got his computer science degree is currently working for a well knowing game design company, and loves it. But he will be the first one to tell you that it is nothing like what he expected.

Some computer games that are produced today are so incredibly complex that they take years to create. In the infancy of the game industry, computer game design teams often consisted of just a few people. Today, many games have several production teams consisting of up to hundreds of different people working simultaneously on different aspects of the game. If you do prove to be a capable programmer than a here in computer game design will reward you handsomely. Veteran programmers who have already completed several game designs can pretty much call their own shots as far as salary and overall creativity. It is an art and science.

If programming isn’t something that appeals to then you still can work in the design industry. Programmers themselves are the king of the hill and the most sought after, but talented artists and creative writers can be attractive employees to game producers. Graphic designers and artists contribute a great deal to computer game design. Many computer game designs also feature actors to do the voice overs of the game’s characters as well. There’s a whole lot that goes into making these babies.

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Morgan Hamilton offers his findings and insights regarding the world of compute software. You can get interesting information here at http://www.computersoftwareinfosite.com/computer-software/computer-software-information/computer-game-design.html

In this day and age, with hardcore chemicals being the scourge of civilized life, heroin, cocaine, vicodin, all the classes of drugs that are man-made and not naturally produced or even those that are natural, it seems silly to talk of addiction to a computer game. But it is neither silly nor trivial. Take heed!

The sheer popularity of these games, played on home computers, Xbox’s, Playstations, Gamecubes and other consoles, shows that this addiction does not affect everyone equally. Some people can play a game for an hour, then go back to work, or watch TV and not give a second thought to the game. Others play it 8 hours a day or more, forgoing meals, family, work, and daily chores.

The corporations that produce these games do not help with the problem, in fact they stoke the fires into roaring blazes. Clearly, they understand that there are millions of people who will forgo simple things in life to pay $10 a month to play on a game for objects and things that are intangible. So they feed the addiction, releasing new objects obtainable only in the online world, or releasing new add-on upgrades and expansion sets for another $50. The bottom line is money of course, they are corporations who are responsible to their shareholders, and no-one wants to blame them for the ruinous addiction they are causing. With ever larger online worlds entering the gaming fray (World of Warcraft, Everquest 2 …), it seems that this is a problem that will only increase.

Psychologists have labelled this as Computer Addiction or Internet Addictive Disorder, a problem very similar to Pathological Gambling or Compulsive Shopping, and sadly it does not just affect one person, but seeps into family life affecting those around the addicted. This is a real disorder, not imagined, and those afflicted need to seek professional help and more significantly, need the love, comfort and support of friends and family. Perhaps a little tough love is in order too, regulate the computer time, turn off your child’s playstation after they have played for an hour, get them involved in real world activities that have nothing to do with a computer.

This is not an American phenomena, or European, this is world-wide, and only getting worse. The Chinese have started camps for adolescents addicted to computers, in a land where nearly 15% of adolescents suffer from Internet Addiction Disorder according to the China Internet Information Center.

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Richard Dows can be found blogging on his site (http://www.thex.com/rd/), freelancing web design or working on new online business models. This author has experienced a mild form of this disorder, playing Diablo and Diablo 2 for hours on end and falling prey to the eBay auction bug for Diablo 2 items. Thankfully I had an experience that changed me, a friend of mine got affected by the Everquest bug, playing all hours of the day, not paying bills, skipping work; it eventually led to her divorce, her being fired, and losing everything. So be warned – addiction need not be drug-based and it can ruin your life.

I‘ve always loved video games, ever since I first played them on a friend’s computer in the afternoon after elementary school. There’s something almost magical about the fact that we can move images around and interact with virtual worlds, a living fantasy presented for us to interact with however we please. I’ve also always wanted to make games myself but, until recently, didn’t have the technical knowledge to do so. Now, I’m a second year software engineering student, so if I weren’t able to code a game without too many dramas there’d be something drastically wrong. But what about the common person: the person for whom the term ‘memory leak’ conjures up images of their grandfather, ‘pipeline’ is where the water flows, and ‘blitting’ is unheard of? Well, everyone can get in on the game creation process, and you don’t even need to learn ‘real’ programming to do so.

So where do games start? With an idea. Games, like all fiction, require an idea to be successful. Sure, in the same way you can just sit down and write a story without foresight, you can jump on in and slap a game together. However, unless you get ridiculously lucky, the best works are usually the ones that have been well thought out beforehand.

There are two methods of planning a project. You can start from a known technological standpoint and build your project on top of that or you can just go for the design, add as many features and ideas as you like, and then remove the ones that you can’t use when you’ve decided on the technology you’re going to implement the game with. In general, the second type is probably the best one to go with when designing games. When you’re first starting out however, the first option will save you many headaches.

So, for a first game you’re going to want a pretty simple idea. Don’t get me wrong, crazy-go-nuts game ideas are fantastic, and there should be more of them out there, but you’re not going to be able to create a real world simulator with fifty billion virtual people all interacting real time with your actions having a butterfly effect on the future of the virtual universe when it’s just your first game. Really. Many people try it; none that I know of have succeeded. Imitation is the best way to start out. Simple games such as ‘Space Invaders’, ‘Tetris’, ‘Pacman’ or even ‘Pong’ are great places to start. All are largely simple to create but have some inherent challenges. ‘Pacman’ for example, requires path finding for the ghosts. I recommend that you start even simpler than that for your very first attempt. ‘Space Invaders’ is a nice point to jump in. You can make a simple, complete game without much effort and it’s almost infinitely extensible.

If you’re stuck for an idea, pick a genre that you enjoy. Do you love adventure games such as ‘Monkey Island’, ‘Grim Fandango’, ‘Space Quest’, ‘King’s Quest’ etc.? Design one of those. Are you into fighting games like ‘Street Fighter’, ‘Tekken’, ‘Soul Calibur’, ‘Mortal Kombat’ and so on? Come up with an idea for that. Do you like first person shooters such as ‘Quake’, ‘Half Life’ or ‘Doom’? I don’t recommend it as a first project, but you can always give it a go. Feel free to be as generic as you like, this is a learning experience after all.

Now that you have your idea it’s time to flesh it out. Don’t worry about the technology or the fact that you may not know how to actually implement a game just yet, just grab yourself some paper and a pencil and go crazy with ideas. Describe the main characters, game play, goals, interactions, story, and key mappings, anything you can think of. Make sure you have enough detail so that someone can read through the notes and play through the game in their head with relative accuracy. Changing game design during the coding process is almost always a bad idea. Once it’s set, it should remain set until the tweaking phase (I’ll go into this more later) or you’re likely to enter ‘development hell’, where the project goes on and on; more and more work is done with less and less outcome.

At the end of this period of your game creation, you should have the following:

- A written outline of the game’s characters and possibly a sketch or two (be they space ships, yellow circles, cars or the prince of the dark kingdom of Falgour, you need to know who or what the player will be and who they will compete against)
- A written outline of the story (if there is one, this isn’t too vital for ‘Space Invaders’ or ‘Tetris’, but for ‘Uber Quest: An Adventure of Awesomeness’ it’s a really good idea)
- A description of game play, written or storyboarded. Storyboards are visual representations of ideas. Draw your characters in actions, with arrows showing the flow of action and short written descriptions detailing the events occurring in your image (because some of us aren’t fantastic artists and our images can be a little… open to interpretation…)

Now that you have a fleshed out idea, it’s time to work out how this will all get put together. If you’ve gotten to this point and are worried that you’re going to have to spend years learning complex programming languages in order to implement your idea, fear not! Others have already done the hard yards for you. There are many RAD (Rapid Application Development) Tools available for game creation, a number of which are available for free online. Some of them still require you to learn a ’scripting language’ (a simplified programming language made for a specific task) but in general this isn’t too complicated or involved. I’ve compiled a brief list of some of these I have found at the end of the article. The free ones are listed first, organized by game genre.

Well, that should be enough to get you started in the creation of your game. The most important thing to remember once you’ve gotten this far is that you need to complete your game. Many people start a project and then lose interest and it fails, or they keep moving on to one new project after another without finishing anything. Start small, build a working (if simple) game that is, above all else, complete. When you get to this stage you will always have a huge number of things that you wish to change, fix etc. but you’ll get a great feeling from knowing that it is, in its way, finished.

From this point, you can start the tweaking phase. Play your game a few times and ask others to do the same. Take note of what isn’t fun or could be better and change things here. At this stage, it is more important than ever to keep backups of previous versions so that if a change doesn’t work you can go back and try something different without losing any of your work. It is at this point that you can add all new features, improve graphics and sounds, whatever you please, safe in the knowledge that you’re working on a solid foundation.

When you’re happy with your game, why not share it with the world? There are many cheap or free places out there for you to host your files on and then you can jump on link lists and forums and let everyone know about your creation. Well, I hope that this has been a helpful introduction into the art of creating games. It’s a great deal of fun, and can open whole new avenues of creative expression for you to explore. Jump in and have fun!

Daniel Punch
M6.Net
http://www.m6.net

Links:
General Game Creation:
(Tools that allow easy creation of many different game types)
Game Maker: http://www.gamemaker.nl
MegaZeux: http://megazeux.sourceforge.net/

Adventure Games:
(Games such as Monkey Island, King’s Quest, Space Quest etc.)
Adventure Game Studio: http://www.bigbluecup.com
AGAST: http://www.allitis.com/agast/
3D Adventure Studio: http://3das.noeska.com/
ADRIFT (for text adventures): http://www.adrift.org.uk/

Role Playing Games (RPGs):
(Games such as Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Diablo)
OHRPG: http://www.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/
RPG Toolit: http://www.toolkitzone.com/

Fighting Games:
(Games such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur etc.)
KOF91: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kof91/
MUGEN (unfortunately the site is largely in French): http://www.streetmugen.com/mugen-us.html

Side-Scrolling Games:
(Games such as the 2D Mario Games, Sonic the Hedgehog, Double Dragon etc.)
The Scrolling Game Development Kit: http://gamedev.sourceforge.net/

There are many others available as well. One particularly useful site for finding game creation tools is: http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html

Also of note, although not freeware, are the excellent game creation tools available by Clickteam at: http://www.clickteam.com/English/
Klik and Play and The Games Factory in particular are the programs to have a look at and download the free demos of.

If you really want to do things right and program the game yourself, there are some excellent programming resources available at the following locations:

Java Game Programming:
http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1262.asp
http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/Java_Game_Programming/

Visual Basic Game Programming:
http://markbutler.8m.com/vb-tutorial.htm

C++ Game Programming:
http://www3.telus.net/alexander_russell/course_dx/introduction_dx.htm
http://www.rit.edu/~jpw9607/tutorial.htm

General Information:
http://www.gamedev.net/
http://www.gamasutra.com/

A cheap computer game does not always mean an old or boring game. If you have some patience and know where to look, you can find some newer releases on the cheap.

One way is to get on the mailing list of a computer game retailer. You will be sent game reviews, and notifications of new releases as well as coupons and special offers on purchases. When you visit the websites of computer game manufacturers and retailers, take a minute to sign up for their email mailing list. You may not be interested in some of it, especially since reviews are such a matter of personal opinion. However it might be worth it if they email you a coupon code or special deal on a new game.

If you don’t want to put up with all that email cluttering your inbox then be sure to check out the Sunday ads. That’s when most retail stores advertise their sales and you may luck out and see a game you have wanted to buy go on sale.

You might be able to buy the computer game cheaper online. The important thing to remember about shopping online is to always comparison shop and factor in your shipping costs. Also, do a quick search for a coupon code for the store you are shopping. You may be able to get a discount or free shipping.

If you are just looking for cheap computer games and don’t really care if it the latest game on the market then you might be just as happy buying previously released games. They are just as fun but are less expensive. This is true especially of sports games that have a new version released each year.

Some of the older games have gone on to be come classics. You can usually save money by ordering these online also.

Eventually after the hype of a new game has passed, the price will fall. The games are still great, but everyone is already looking for the next new game. That in a nutshell explains why it is possible you can buy some great cheap computer games if you just want to wait until they have been on the market awhile.

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Jeff Clark is a staff writer at Games Enthusiast and is an occasional contributor to several other websites, including Technology Digest.

The definition of a cheat is pretty easy to figure out. If you have an affair with someone other than your lover, you can be called a cheat. If you copy answers from another person during an exam, you can also be called a cheat. In sports, if you try to win or get an advantage by disregarding the rules you are cheating but in computer games this definition become hard to follow. Taking advantage or lying to your fellow game players does not automatically mean you are cheating.

Cheating in a computer game is defined by the game and the people who are playing it.A lot of computer games come with a “cheat code”. This is usually to help a person get started and makes the game a little easier. They are usually designed for a single player. If you use these cheat codes you are cheating technically but it doesn’t mean you have an advantage.

The most common occurrence of cheating is when there are multiplayer and mass multiplayer games through the internet. In this instance, the players are not known to each other so they don’t have the restrictive influence of being seen by their opponents.

There are two main areas of cheating in computer games. You can change your settings through the use of exploits, bugs and external software or cheesing.

If you alter your computer settings, the layout of the computer’s hardware or the computer game to fit your gaming style you are cheating in a sense and this can be alright. But if you went even further and changed the brightness or the color of the screen in order to see better in shadow areas it becomes questionable.

Exploits are termed as errors in the game itself that give an advantage to one person or another. If someone deliberately uses those it a game, it could be considered cheating but it also could add to the excitement of the game.

There are software programs you can purchase that modify a program that runs computer game. This is a more serious form of cheating. Other software programs study the status of the game through the computer’s RAM

Another form of cheating is called cheesing. This is when the players do things that cannot happen in real life or are not allowed in real life.

The most common of game cheats these days find ways to change the game’s software. Even if the game developers try to encrypt or protect the files, there are software programs that will be able to change the game’s code without changing the main program. Cheats of this kind may be detected using programs that are installed on a server.

Preventing computer game cheaters is not easy. There are a lot of grey areas to agree on and consider before you term someone a cheat.

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Beverly Kane is a staff writer at Games Enthusiast and is an occasional contributor to several other websites, including The Shopping Gazette.

The term computer game might have one more meaning than you realize.

You are familiar with one kind, games that run on computers? They are set in eras from prehistoric and Roman times up to the present, and into various wonderful and depressing future worlds.

There are also games in the physical world, played with pens and paper and imagination which involve the characters doing things in the virtual world of the Internet. Players, and the referee, sit with pen and paper pretending to be using computers. Instead of clicking a mouse to make a computer barbarian use his sword, these gamers roll dice to have their character ‘Google’ their enemy’s name, or hack into their computer.

Yes, this seem ludicrous even to me, and I’ve done it.

Remember, paper-and-pen role-playing games have evolved since their invention, just like personal computers and computer games. So, while the popular media is portraying the equivalent of ‘Pong’, gamers are playing the pen-and-paper equivalent of Myst or Dark Age of Camelot.

One of the better game systems in my opinion is The Storyteller System from White Wolf Game Studios. Mostly set in modern times, they feature werewolves called Glasswalkers who are proud of being hi-tech and fond of mobile phones and personal organizers. Another game, Mage the Ascension, features a group called the Virtual Adepts who try to help humanity and change the world for the better using computers and the Internet: Just like some people in the ‘real world’. I’m sure Virtual Adepts would love the idea of giving African children wind-up laptops.

But remember, Mage is ABOUT computers, not ON computer. Players and the referee just pretend to be using the Internet, using dice and imagination.

Of course like the rest of the world, Mage exists in the virtual world too. The storyteller games, and White Wolf, have websites devoted to them, both official and fan-based. There is a remarkable amount of good information about Mage available online.

So, you’ll find websites about how to pretend to surf the Internet, or create a website using a pen, paper, dice and your imagination. Or buy printed books online to help you play your Virtual Adept’s online adventures. You can also probably buy the same books in PDF format. This is useful if you use your laptop instead of pen and paper, as my friend Jess does.

I’m amused to imagine someone using their laptop to play Dark Age of Camelot, swinging swords in a computer generated world, while waiting for their fellow Mage players to arrive at their house. Then, when their friends ‘physically’ arrive, logging off and using their computer and a handful of dice to pretend to surf the web as a virtual adept.

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By Allan T. Price http:// http://www.m6.net Allan T. Price is a creative writer working at http://M6.Net: ‘The web-hosting company for humans.’ http://M6.Net is working hard to help humanity experience the power and freedom to develop their own part of the Internet, to share their information and connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime.