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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.

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. For motion capture you use human actors who are dressed in a leotard with integral reflective or magnetic markers. The actor performs the actions that are required, and the digital cameras - or array of cameras - capture the motion of the reflective markers.


Computer Processing with Human Intervention
You subject the data to a computer process that converts this motion into a composite figure. You then modify this composite figure by normal computer animation software.

The end product gives the effect of an animated character acting directly with human actors. Gollum, in the Lord of the Rings, was shot in this fashion, giving an absolutely life-like image of a composite character. Same things go for video games. Paul Pierce (shown on the left) is rigged for motion capturing for the XBox game NBA Inside Drive.

Motion capturing techniques are very effective, but the computer processing needs much human intervention, and if there is any error in the data, you can find it more effective to re-shoot the whole scene rather than correct the data. However, motion capture technology is so much more effective and realistic than traditional techniques, and ultimately less time consuming, that its future looks assured in movies

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