Game Dev FAQ

Welcome to the Game Dev FAQ, a collection of frequently asked questions about video game design and development.

This is an open FAQ for the community to add questions and contribute answers if you're so inclined. Actually, the success of this FAQ might well depend on visiting experts lending a hand in answering (or adding to) the questions posted by other members.

Sign up for a free account and you'll be able to post questions and answers to the FAQ. All initial question posts must be approved to help cut down on spam and noise, but anyone will be able to post replies in the form of comments. Please post more info on a topic if you have more information or an opinion on the subject. Moderators will be wandering around to keep the pages clean, but I want to encourage participation from the community.

If you have suggestions about the Game Dev FAQ, please let me know (use the contact form.)

Submit Question

Here is the best place for you to post a video game development question for the Game Dev School community to answer... or attempt to answer. :)

Sign up for a free account and you'll be able to post comments on the whole site, but you'll want to add your questions here. Here's what you do:

Click "add new comment" below and enter your question
Be specific! The more specific you are with your question, the more specific the resulting answer can be. Include examples if possible, but mainly, just thoroughly explain your question.
Don't expect miracles! We'll try to pull together answers from the community and game development friends of ours, but if you want to know "how do I make the AI in my game work?"... well, you might not get that question answered.

This is going to be a tough project, since many questions are very difficult to answer in a small space like this. If it comes down to having to do your work for you, you may not get many people spending a ton of time answering your questions. There are not a huge number of visitors to this site yet, but it will grow so go ahead and post a question since it might help out someone else who reads it much later.

Audio

Music & sound effects are incredibly important to video games. Yes, I'm somewhat biased since I'm an "audio guy" myself, but nobody will tell you that game audio is less than integral to a quality experience for the players.

Post questions about game audio here (or audio in general), including content development tools, techniques or whatever else you want to talk about.

Sound Design

"Sound Design" is a very important sub-set of any sound and music creator's job. The ability to understand the needs of a project and implement the best soundscape for the game should never be underestimated.

Game Design

FAQ entries about Game Design topics.

Programming

Research and solutions for various questions about computer programming with regards to video game development. There might be some stuff here that isn't specifically "game" related, but it's all stuff many developers find relevant to some part of their work.