Yesterday , during the English class, we had the opportunity to attend a conference about Digipen.
Digipen is a video game university that teaches computer science, programming and animation. Despite the fact that we do not usually think that the video game industry makes a lot of money, video games solely made in Spain earn nearly one billion euros every year, and Spain isn’t even the country in which there are the most gamers in Europe.In Germany, France and the UK, there are 150 million gamers.
Games are made in two stages: programming and animation. Programming is what happens when combining an intelligent person and a not so intelligent computer. The game engine in a computer is what gives it enough information to complete its task. There are three stages to this: the physics engine, how to do it, the artificial intelligence, what to do, and the graphics engine, that converts data to a visual interface.
Animation can be used both for video games and films. The ” moving pictures” are made by taking 24 images per second. The process is very long and difficult, it involves drawing a picture, placing a new piece of paper on top of it and slowly modifying it until the video imitates human movements smoothly. There are different methods of camera movement to give the image perspective: zoom, focus and parallax.
3D video games are much harder to make than films, due to the fact that they have to be rendered in real time, whereas films take hundreds of hours to render, because they will always be the same. Taking into account that video games have to be rendered very quickly, they can only be made of around 150,000 polygons. Films however, are made up by millions of polygons.
Digipen was the first ever video game school in the world. Students from all over the world come to Bilbao to study in Digipen and to be specialized in the art of making video games and animations.
Maddalen Lázaro ( 1º Bachillerato)