How AAA title games were made

  Bibin       January 29, 2020

AAA title games are ruling the game industry with its ultra-realistic graphics and sound effects. Vfx in recent releases such as the Call Of Duty Modern Warfare and Death stranding are the best examples of close to life graphics and sounds. The production cost and complexity in developing these games are more than what we could imagine.

Let’s see how these incredible games are made. Most of these kinds of games sometimes cost more than big-budget Hollywood action films.

Concepts, ideas, plans and drawings 

Usually, the first stage is explaining the concept to the developers, artists and designers. By concept, it means the story of the game, what is the situation, where is it happening and when is it happening all that kind of stuff. Then comes the character creation part. Needless to say, but creating characters according to the story of the game and the personality of the character is a tedious task.

After it’s done the next phase is writing the script for the scene with dialogues. Directors explain the scene to the actors with the necessary props to create a scene. Then the scene is shot inside studios surrounded by motion capture cameras.

Motion Capture with model actors 

Finding the right actors with voice and facial features is critical in deciding how appealing a character will be to the players. If that part is done then the character motion capture of actors along with facial expressions is recorded with lip movement or sometimes voices at the scene itself for creating originality in dialogues. After capturing this, character motion, special features and costumes of the characters appropriate to the scenes are added.

Creating an environment where the characters should be placed comes next. This is one complex part that requires skilled texture artists. The world surrounding the character and how it seems to the player, all of these things are very important in deciding how immersive the game would be. Every single one of the assets is created individually and placed in the environment as it’s elements.

Then there comes where the lights, it’s intensity, angle and shadows should be. After creating a demo model with sample images and videos, then the real game texture and elements are ready to render in the game engine.

Integrating everything with the Game Engine 

The two commonly used game engines nowadays are unity and unreal. A game engine acts as a wireframe to create video games. It manages all graphical aspects and even memory management. Game engines are reusable to create something new as well.

A game engine contains five components: Game logic, which is managed by the main game program, Second, a rendering engine to generate 3D graphics; an audio engine with sophisticated algorithms to handle audio, A physics engine which controls and coordinates physical laws of motion and mechanics, finally an AI engine which is manipulated by intelligent software engineers.

All the 3D assets are ported into the game engine. Demo player assets are added into the engine to test things out. Then these assets are polished before the final render. AI bots are also integrated into the system to check whether the environment and in-game physics work flawlessly with other in-game elements.

Game testers check every single sequence, scene by scene so many times to check graphical or mechanics mistakes. In the end, the complete game is rendered in the engine. Like said before, the big-budget game development processes are more complex and time-consuming just like Hollywood films.

Hope this article was helpful in throwing light to the major processes involved in developing AAA title games. Share it with your friends and gaming nerds. Contact us if you want help with any development services.