First Reference of many

I have found sevearl references (all 10 to be exact) and I will be going through them over the next couple of days so that by Saturday, or Sunday at the latest, I should have all 10 references up on my blog so people can look at what I have.

The first I am looking at is: Level design optimization guidelines for game artist using the epic game: Unreal editor and unreal engine 2. Written by Christian Rubino and John Power.

http://dl.acm.org.ueaezproxy.uea.ac.uk:2048/citation.cfm?id=1461999.1462007&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=47122683&CFTOKEN=82692546

This article was one of the first I came across in relation to level design. I nearly disposed of it as a source due to it focusing on the Unreal Engine. However, after reading the article I have found that while it does focus on the Unreal Engine from a technical standpoint the principles presented in the article would apply to level design in general.

The article discuss' what it refers to as 'Level optimization', which is a means of improving the 'fram rate' of a level in the game and how much of an importance it is. According to the article the player(s) make judgements of the game based on both the art of the game (the visual look) and the 'playability' of the game. Frame rate comes heavily under the playabiltiy side of things, it is a means of measuring how quickly the computer can render objects that the player can see every time the player interacts with the game (usually by moving the camera perspective).

If the FPS (Frames Per-Second) is low, the game takes a long time to compute and render the 'new' image and the 'speed' of the game is reduced as such. In games such as FPS and racing games this is not a good thing since those genres rely on quick responses from the player. RPGs on the other hand do not require as heavily on a high FPS reading since they rely more on visuals and story.

Since my project involves making a level for an FPS-RPG hybrid using existing in game assets, I believe this reference is important to me in the means of explaining that keeping the FPS consistant and high is needed so that the player would enjoy the level and find its 'playability' high.