A cutscene is a sequence in a video game that is played between gameplay segments, usually to convey story elements, character development, or important plot points. Cutscenes typically involve animated graphics, voice acting, and music, and they may use various cinematic techniques such as camera angles and editing to create a narrative experience for the player.
An Environment Artist is a professional in the fields of video games, animation, and film who specializes in creating the settings and backgrounds within which the action takes place. Their primary focus is on designing and building the environments that characters interact with, ensuring these spaces are visually appealing and immersive.
A Game Design Document (GDD) is a comprehensive blueprint for a video game that outlines all aspects of the game's design and development. It serves as a guide for the development team, ensuring that everyone involved in the project has a clear understanding of the game's vision, mechanics, story, characters, art style, and overall goals. ### Key Components of a Game Design Document: 1. **Game Overview**: - Title: The name of the game.
A lightmap is a technique used in computer graphics, particularly in the context of 3D rendering and game development, to pre-calculate lighting effects for static objects in a scene. Lightmaps store the indirect lighting information of surfaces in a texture, allowing for more efficient rendering during real-time applications. Here's a breakdown of how lightmaps work: 1. **Pre-calculation**: During the development phase, rendering software calculates how light interacts with surfaces in a scene.
A narrative designer is a professional who specializes in crafting the storytelling aspects of various media, particularly in video games, but also in other interactive experiences such as virtual reality, mobile apps, and transmedia projects. Their role typically combines elements of writing, game design, and storytelling to create immersive narratives that enhance player engagement and experience.
The New York Game Awards is an annual event that celebrates achievements in the video game industry. Established in 2014, the awards are presented by the New York Videogame Critics Circle, a group of video game journalists and critics. The event honors various categories, including Game of the Year, Best Indie Game, Best Mobile Game, and more, recognizing both major and independent developers.
Video game music refers to the soundtracks and audio compositions specifically created for video games. This genre encompasses a wide variety of styles and can include anything from orchestral scores to electronic soundscapes, chiptunes, rock themes, and more. Video game music serves multiple purposes, including setting the tone of the game, enhancing the gameplay experience, providing emotional depth, and often contributing to the game's overall narrative.
Cooperative video games are a genre of video games designed to be played by multiple players working together towards a common goal. Unlike competitive games, where players compete against each other, cooperative games emphasize teamwork, communication, and collaboration to achieve objectives, complete missions, or overcome challenges. Key features of cooperative video games include: 1. **Teamwork:** Players must often coordinate their actions, strategize together, and support one another to progress in the game.
Real numbers are a set of numbers that include all the numbers on the number line. This set encompasses several categories of numbers, including: 1. **Natural Numbers**: The positive integers starting from 1 (e.g., 1, 2, 3, ...). 2. **Whole Numbers**: Natural numbers plus zero (e.g., 0, 1, 2, 3, ...).
Interactive narrative refers to a form of storytelling where the audience actively participates in shaping the narrative experience. This can take several forms, including video games, interactive films, and digital storytelling projects, where the choices made by the audience or player influence the direction and outcome of the story. Key characteristics of interactive narrative include: 1. **User Agency**: The audience or player has the power to make choices that impact the storyline or characters, leading to multiple possible outcomes. This creates a personalized experience.
Archaeogaming is an interdisciplinary field that combines elements of archaeology and video game studies to explore the relationships between games and archaeological practices, themes, and representations of the past. It involves the study of how video games and virtual environments can be used to simulate, represent, or reflect archaeological concepts, as well as how archaeological methods can be applied to analyze and interpret games.
Hotseat is a multiplayer gaming mode typically used in turn-based games where multiple players share the same physical device, such as a computer or console. In this mode, players take turns playing the game, allowing each participant to make their moves or decisions sequentially without needing separate accounts or devices. The term "hotseat" originated from tabletop role-playing games and board games, where players would sit around a table and take their turns in a rotating fashion.
A "longplay" is a type of video game video that showcases a player completing a game from start to finish, often including commentary or insights throughout the gameplay. Longplays are typically longer than standard playthroughs or Let's Plays, as they aim to provide a comprehensive look at the game, covering all levels, storylines, and sometimes additional content such as side quests or collectibles.
A multiplayer video game is a type of video game that allows multiple players to interact with each other simultaneously, either locally or online. This interaction can take many forms, from cooperative gameplay where players work together toward a common goal, to competitive gameplay where players face off against each other. There are various types of multiplayer games, including: 1. **Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs)**: These games can host thousands of players in a shared online world.
Powergaming is a term often used in gaming, especially in role-playing games (RPGs) and multiplayer online games, to describe a style of play where a player focuses on maximizing their character's strengths and abilities to gain the most competitive advantage, often at the expense of the game's narrative or the enjoyment of other players.
A single-player video game is a type of video game designed to be played by one player at a time. In these games, the player typically controls a single character or avatar within the game's world and embarks on various objectives, quests, missions, or challenges. The experience is often narrative-driven, and the gameplay can vary widely, ranging from action and adventure to role-playing, puzzle-solving, and simulation.
A sound test typically refers to an assessment or evaluation of audio equipment, sound quality, or audio performance. This can take various forms depending on the context: 1. **Audio Equipment Testing**: This could involve checking speakers, microphones, headphones, or other audio gear for sound quality, clarity, volume levels, and frequency response. 2. **Music Production**: In a studio setting, a sound test might be conducted to ensure that instruments and vocals are recorded properly and that the mix sounds balanced.
Toys-to-life is a gaming trend that allows physical toys to interact with video games through technology such as NFC (Near Field Communication) or RFID (Radio-frequency identification). This concept combines physical and digital play, enabling players to use real-world figurines or objects that can be placed on a special portal or base to unlock characters, abilities, or items within a game.
ASME Y14.5 is a standard developed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), which provides guidelines for geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) in engineering and manufacturing drawings. First issued in 1982, this standard outlines a uniform system for defining and communicating the size, shape, form, and position of physical parts. Key components of ASME Y14.
Graph paper is a type of paper that is printed with a grid of fine lines, creating a series of small squares or rectangles. These grids can vary in size and spacing, depending on the intended use of the paper. The lines are usually light enough to be easily ignored or drawn over while still providing a helpful guide for drawing shapes, graphs, diagrams, and charts. Graph paper is commonly used in mathematics and engineering to plot functions, draw geometric shapes, and create scale models.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact