Lesson 1 Continued: What are video games? - Objects in games

A video game is composed of many different types of things and the most important thing in the games are objects. These are exactly what they sound like. They are things like people, monsters, characters, houses, chairs, stairs, cars, dragons and almost anything else.

About Objects in Video Games

When you have created a game with develoment software you have an empty and static world. Think of it as an empty house - just a bunch of rooms and a backyard. You have to put objects in that world and there are two types of objects: static and dynamic.

Static Objects: These are objects that don't do anything and could be anything like a picture on the wall, a plant or a stairway.

Dynamic objects: These are things that do something and they could be the character, a monster, an NPC, a waterfall, a door that opens or any number of things. should always draw out your games and levels on paper before you start on the computer. Here is a tutorial that shows you how to get the most out of level design on paper Design your game on paper first!

Creating Objects in Games

When making a video game the static objects are pretty straight forward. You simply draw them in some kind of graphic program then insert and place them in your game. You can make two dimensional objects in programs like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop or you can make 3 dimensional objects in programs like Maya, Lightwave or Milkshape.

But dynamic objects are a little more complex and they can be two dimensional or three dimensional but because they do something you have to tell the game what they do and this requires scripting. This is bits of code similar to what you saw in the first part of this lesson. But the good thing about game making is that there is a lot of scripting already done for you! You don't have to write any scripts or even understand them to use them - many come with the software and many more are freely available. You just have to select a button to activate them and assign them to an object. This is what happens with the player in the game. It is an object that has scripts assigned to it. These scripts are anything from jump, run, swim, die, fall, shoot or wave his hands.

If you get really good at programming you are going to want to learn how to do scripting so you can make up your own unique things that happen in your game.

Let's Continue on and learn about Textures in video games