Week 6:

Gameplay is a term that is used to describe how a game is shown and how it interacts with the user. A first person shooter game will have fast gameplay requiring quick reflexes whereas an RPG will have slower gameplay requiring a stronger mind to get the best out of your party. However game play can be used as a more general term used in reviews to talk about everything the game has to offer and how well
it handles as well as how easy or hard the game is. Game play is a hard term to pin down but I believe you can use it to compare games to eachother especially when you look at fundamentals. Taking out the story and context of a game will make alot of them seem very familiar. Alot of RPGs involve you saving the world from some madman same with platformers too. Both these games expect you to avoid many hazards while going from point A all the way to point Z and Sports and racing games all boil down to being better than the competition.

It is from these foundations that visuals and stories are thought up. It is the job of the artists to draw down some designs of places and people from descriptions that the storyline writer has given. While it may be up to only one writer, it could be the job of many artists to show everything that the gamer will see. After these designs are given the go ahead, they are modelled in 3D. Some companies may want to produce sculptures of their characters and objects in order to show every angle and perhaps how movement can be portrayed. As well as character and object artists, there are also the level designers who will show what an environment will look like. Whether it be the inside of a science lab or a dense rainforest, the level designers will work on showing these elements. It is certainly cheaper to hire a limited amount of all around designers but for a better visual, a company should hire specialists in to create the look. While working on a game like Doom, it would be far better to hire people who specialise in creating aliens and non-humans and people who can make caves and sterile interiors rather than those who specialise in the militia and large fields.