Guide to Game Development/Theory

Categories

• Game logic

The general set up that most games fit around

• Mathematics

Basic Math, Vectors, Matrices, Trigonometry, Calculus, Quaternions

• Geometry

The drawing of the objects in the scene, e.g. the player, enemies, terrain, boxes

• Transformations

Translation, Scale, Rotation

• • Pose

Poses and Coordinate frames

• Camera

The view-port that the game is viewed from. Perspective & Orthographic projects.

• Lighting

The Lighting that's cast onto the scene. Ambient, Diffuse, Specular lighting, Normal vectors and Lightmaps.

• Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and Heads-up-displays (HUD)

The menus that the user navigates and the displays that appear on top of the game to display statistics like health.

• Collision detection

How all of the entities in the game collide with each other and the terrain.

• Physical motion

The physics/mechanics behind the motion, forces and gravity.

• Textures

How textures are loaded, stored and placed onto geometry.

• Shaders and Graphic pipelines

How the geometry, camera and lighting in a scene gets processed from the scene to the screen.

• Artificial Intelligence

Programming of intelligence into a computer/bot/enemy.

• • Path Finding

Path finding algorithms used by AI

• Animations

In game animations

• User inputs

How you handle user inputs and how they affect things in the game

• Viewing angles

The topic of different types of game genres and how to create for that genre

• Miscellaneous theory

Everything else to do with theory

External Links

Youtube:

• Math for Game Developers by Jorge Rodriguez - A Youtube series teaching you about the maths behind game development.
• 3D Physics Engine Tutorial by thebennybox
• Coding Math - A Youtube channel that links mathematics with coding.
• Extra Credits - A Youtube channel that discusses the theory of games and game design/development.

Wikipedia:

• List of Mathematical Symbols