As a games artist you are trying to make things look as good as you can with as little impact as possible on the computing time needed to draw them. Computers and consoles only have a finite amount of computational time in their CPU (Central Processing Unit) or GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).

When developing a game, the framerate is the performance measuring stick, where 1 frame is equal to the time taken to process everything. In each frame the computer or console must figure out exactly what is going on, where it is happening, what can be seen and what can be heard, then draw what needs to be seen and play the correct sound. The more things the CPU needs to do in a frame means the frame will take longer to complete.

The faster a frame can be processed, the better a game will look and sound. When you see a game running at 3-5 frames per second (fps), it looks awful - it stutters. You can often notice this happening in some racing games - at the first corner in the race before the pack is split up the console is having to compute and draw 20 cars - that’s a lot of data. It can be likened to looking at the world through a strobe light. It is generally unacceptable for games to run at any less than around 25 frames per second. With faster paced games, especially reaction based games such as First Person Shooters (also shortened to FPS, but uppercase), it is important to have even higher framerates. PC gamers often tweak their systems to eek every last framerate boost to give them that edge over their opponents.

So where does all this leave us as artists? Well, we need to make our work as efficient as possible. Sure, a highly detailed model with dozens of large highly detailed textures will look wonderful, but if the hardware can only display that one model on screen, with nothing else - no AI, no sound - then the game will not be much fun, will it? It won’t be some much a game, more of a picture. At the end of the day, you are there to make art for a game, not a game to display your art.

There are 2 hard and fast rules to remember when it comes to helping the framerate:

• Keep your polygon counts lower
• Keep your texture smalls.

One of the most important aspects of working with games is to remember that the end result is a game, not simply a collection of art and sound and code. Since this is important, it sounds like a great place to start the book.

“Of course the end result is a game!” I hear you cry. While it sounds like a simple premise, it is one that is all too easily forgotten. As an artist, your job is to make art for the game, and the game is more important than your work.

I have met more than one person in my career who put the work they had done before the game. These people were convinced that their work (whether art, sound, design, code or other) was perfect and that it should be used exactly as it was with no changes.

It might seem like a cliché, but these days a game is a team effort, and people need to be flexible. You might produce the best piece or work in your entire career, but if it doesn’t fit the game, it will need to be changed.

Not only that, but your artwork is there as a part of the game, to complement the other art, the sound, the AI, the gameplay, held together by magic code glue. You art has to fit into memory with all those other things, so while you might complain about the specs you have been given, the chances are that they were given for a reason.

As an aside, I was once in the situation where a terrible piece of game code had been written, and when several people protested we were told that since it had been written, it was going in - otherwise it would have been a waste of the programmers time.

This was only a few days after several of my completed characters were cut from the game because the story had changed.

A series of posts where I try to pretend I know something about the games industry. Updated when I can pull enough words together.

45 hours into Final Fantasy 12. A good game, quite shallow in places. Now I’m bored of it, it’s reached the stage of ‘10 Walk 20 kill creature 30 goto 10′

And I bought Metal Gear Solid 3 last weekend…

Google has some of the greatest services around, though I wish they’d bought Flickr instead of what they are doing with Picasa web albums.

I’m also surprised that they are missing a Google Address Manager too - not for email addresses, but for real addresses. In Google Calendar, I’ve created a Birthdays calendar. I’ve shared that with several family members so we can all add and keep tracks of family birthdays. Imagine the same features in an addressbook, available from and computer or handheld device. Want to send a postcard to Auty Mable while you are in Tokyo?

Group addresses as Public, Private, Friends, Family.
Create new groups, and assign viewing and editing privileges to other google users.