Textures in Video Games

Textures are a very important aspect of video game making. In this lesson we will take a quick look at textures, understand what they are, how they work and how you can use them.

When you are making a video game you are at first designing an empty shell of a world. This picture here shows exactly this. Picture the whole world as being unpainted. Everything is a drab grey color. You have to apply textures to all of this world and it is these textures that will bring it to life.

This is an example of a typical texture for a video game (Marble Wall texture). It is a square and let's say you wanted a whole wall to be covered in this texture; the game would take this square and repeat it on the whole wall. This is what the game engine does so you don't have to repeat it yourself. But this can cause probles because if the square of texture isn't handled and created properly a wall with lots of these squares could look really funny - it could look like a wall of repeated squares instead of a nice complete wall with an even texture.

So there are things you will learn about making textures and getting them ready for your game. For now all of the software we use in this school comes with plenty of pre-made textures that are ready to use.

Texture making and development is a very vibrant part of the game industry and there are people who specialize in this skill. It can involve lots of art work, lots of computer work and even taking pictures of real world things and transforming the pictures into textures for video games.

Let's look at some video game design software