Perhaps most interestingly for class application, semester-based student projects require planning. Normally, instructors do much of the planning to ensure a better chance of student project success. However, software this organized can take some of the burden off instructors and can, in turn, better prepare students for large project development.
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9/30/2006

10/7/2006

Design Constraints and Project Development
Text Box: When starting any new project, one of the most difficult tasks is organization. Constraints—budgetary, systematic, chronological—aid in defining project boundaries. The boundaries help define the general scope, requirements, supplementary concerns, and these can lead to an organizational scheme for project development. Whether the project is building construction, web development, physical fitness, or game design, the project constraints help shape the project itself. Video game development needs similar constraints to help define the larger project and the individual components within the project. Unlike many other projects, however, video game development often follows a changing set of constraints. In the early years of gaming, video game development was constrained financially and technically by gaming technology and game interfaces. Now, game development has fewer constraints and the open arena of game development makes defining a project more difficult in many ways. Where games were once limited to certain styles of visual representation, games can now utilize photorealistic 3D graphics, sprite graphics, cartoon imagery, watercolor effects as Ôkami highlights, and more. The ever-increasing technical possibilities often seem to remove design constraints as more and more options are added. However, certain constraints—user expectations, budget, and timing—remain even as other options expand. The increase in options and blurring of current constraints requires that designers have a global sense of a project’s scope as well as a sense of the individual components necessary to implement the project. As the options change, maintaining a sense of the larger picture and the supporting modules becomes more difficult.