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Concept / Storyboard Artists flesh out the game with sketches and paintings of characters, levels, vehicles, and other elements in a game. This will give an early feel for the game. Character artists as well as level designers much of the time fill this role.

Character Artists & Animators work with 3D programs such as Maya or 3DS Max to produce the characters and objects that make up the video games.

Level Designers are given sections or levels of the game, creating the environments that the player will interact in. They will have a huge impact on whether the game will have the look and feel of what the design team had envisioned.

Texture Artists give the skins to levels and characters. They have to make sure the textures are properly mapped onto the 3D objects and backgrounds in a convincing and seamless way.

Programmers work on the video game engine, AI, and anything pretty much that will make the game run. C++ is the programming language of choice for most game programming.

Sound / Audio: There will be people working on the sound effects of the game, as well as the music that often is playing in the background.

Professional Testers are often employed, another video game career. These people put in long hours to find bugs and other potential problems.

Artificial Intelligence today it is almost impossible to write professional style games without using at least some aspects of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a useful tool to use to help to create characters that have a choice of responses to games player's actions, but have to be able to act in a fairly unpredictable fashion.

Motion Capture Technology Motion capture technology is a good example of how digital techniques are being applied to the video game (and related) industries to allow more convincing visualizations of imaginary or composite images.

Artificial Intelligence Programming for Video Games

Today it is almost impossible to write professional style games without using at least some aspects of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a useful tool to use to help to create characters that have a choice of responses to games player's actions, but have to be able to act in a fairly unpredictable fashion.

Video game artificial intelligence is a programming area that tries to make the computer act in a similar way to human intelligence. There are a number of underlying principles behind video game AI, the major one being that of having a rule based system whereby information and rules are entered into a database, and when the video game AI is faced with a situation, it finds appropriate information and acts on it according to the set of rules that apply to the situation. If the AI database is large enough, then there is sufficient unpredictability in the database to produce a simulation of human choice.

If you are interested in working on video game artificial intelligence, then you need to be a skilled programmer in this area. You will learn how to build video game AI simulations, and to apply the AI techniques that can make video game artificial intelligence such an effective tool.

Salaries for video game programmers in general depends on experience and where you work. In the first few years, you can expect to get on average $50,000+, with an increase to $80,000+ with 5+ years of experience under your belt.


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