During our olden golden college days, when we used to spend sleepless nights during our preparation holidays, making our strategies for command and conquer or improving our shooting skills through counter strike, we never really gave a thought to the minds behind creating these entertaining games -Â Game Developers. This job is a new trend. Since millions of people like to play games on their cell phones, PSPs, and laptops, this booming industry needs highly qualified professionals to create new games to sustain the entertainment demand of gamers. If you have superb skills in programming and developing programs in a computer and if you are creative and imaginative enough to create exciting and interesting games, you are highly in demand to fill the gap in the gaming field.
Over the years, India has emerged as a key one-stop destination for game development. The game industry is under increasing pressure to reduce development time and the cost of production. Reason enough for major publishers and studios to look at outsourcing development. This is where Indian game developers with their world-class quality and game development experience step in. India has excellent programmers and the rapid growth of the market is adding to the allure.
The games being made are not limited to TV screens to be played using joysticks. These days people want to have interesting gaming applications in their phones, laptops, iPods so that they can kill time at their leisure. Especially when people travel, it is always nice to have a game in your hands, which would keep you busy, make you brainstorm a little and above all keep you entertained. Be it one of those simple snake games or one of the high end games like Prince of Persia, the desire to move ahead to higher levels, scoring maximum points, defeating your opponents and above all the spirit of winning the game are a few things, which keep the gaming trend on the go.
The gaming industry provides all of us with a wide range of opportunities and brings exciting scope for growth for texture artists, 3D artists, environment artists, graphics and GUI artists, level designers, and flash and graphics programmers as well as for web developers. Gaming development platform provides a tremendous platform to exhibit not only your technical skills but also your creativity. Moreover, one can bring a big difference in his life, both career wise as well as financially.
Here are some of the very important skill sets required for gaming development:
Key skill sets for game development on various media available in India:
PC: Shockwave, Flash, Visual Basic, Java, visual C++, DirectX, Open GL, Graphics software like Adobe Photoshop, animation software like Maya, 3D Studio Max, Lightwave etc.
Console: the respective software development kit, Visual C++, Dire ctx, open GL,
Pocket PC: Flash, Embedded Visual C++, Embedded Visual Basic, Personal Java, graphics software like Macromedia Fireworks,.
Mobile phone: Visual C++ for native application development, J2ME, VB, WAP, ASP, JSP, graphics software like Macromedia Fireworks,
Here are some of the gaming companies in India:
- Dhruva Interactives
- Icreon’s
- Trine Games
- Infinity world
- Accolade
- Activision
The future for India’s game development community looks bright. Take for example the case of mobile gaming. It is the rising star in India’s fast growing mobile business. Gaming is the key element in operators’ and content developers’ strategies to develop new, high value revenue streams, beyond basic voice services and simple text messaging. The growth of this sector has attracted publishers, developers, animators and content providers and is also stimulating the development of innovative business models. So why think too much, let’s just make a game plan to make better games.
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