“It’s not rocket science.” Well, actually, it kind of is. The basic science of rockets involves a complex understanding of math and physics, which is also a key component in game design. If you look into what you should study for a career in video games, at the top of the list will be art, math, and physics. From ‘Pong’ to 3D gaming, physics has played a pivotal role in making a game feel natural and life-like. For this article, we will be talking with Catherine Goode, who studied physics at The University of Birmingham and has worked for companies like Sony, Frontier, and is now a game designer at a company called Preloaded.
Catherine Goode, who is a game designer and physics scholar from University of Birmingham, was nice enough to allow me to interview her for this article. Being a gamer herself, she especially loves physics platformers like “Portal” where you use momentum to solve the in-game puzzles. Catherine has plenty of experience in the gaming industry and her last project was “Wonderbook: Book of Potions” from SCE London Studio, which is a physical book accessory that uses your television to bring paper to life. Using her knowledge from her studies, she created behaviors like gravity to create the illusion that the player was sitting in the actual level. Catherine thanks her degree for helping her with many skills she uses in her career in gaming such as arguing for a theory, writing documentation, and also being clear and concise among other things. “This is the difference between an ideas person, and a games designer,” Catherine tells me, “the complete picture of an idea, rather than just the concept itself.”
Understanding how physics is implemented into a video game will not only give you a new appreciation for the art of game creation, it will probably make you look at the game you’re playing in a whole new light. Whether you’re a casual gamer or a die-hard fan, this article should bring you a little closer to understanding why it’s possible for you to be so immersed into the game you’re playing. Physics in gaming comes in many different forms, all of which produce a realistic experience for gamers. With the evolution of games, the major focus is to have games look better and seem more real. Let’s delve into some of the types of physics and how they function in your game.
Particle systems in video games are usually the surrounding elements of the environment in a video game. When you switch to your grenade launcher and fire off a round, how do developers make the explosion look so real? The answer is particle systems. That box you blew up with your grenade is made up of particles, and the physics comes to play when you look at how the particles react after the explosion. In a good game, no two explosions should be exactly the same. This is due to the degree of randomness set for the particles’ behavior, instead of a set value that will produce the same result over and over. What are other particle system elements? Fire, smoke, water, sparks, clouds, and the animation produced when you summon a fire ball from your hands to hurl at the enemy are all included in the particle system.
While you were busy shooting that grenade at the box to see what the explosion looked like, your opponent comes behind you and tries to kill you. You take off running. The problem is that you were on top of a building and now you’re plummeting to the ground. This is an example of ragdoll physics. In an older game with less advanced systems, once you dropped off that ledge it would produce a pre-existing animation that shows you dropping to your death in the same way every time, regardless of circumstance. Some games utilize ragdoll physics by using preset animations enhanced by constraints to create a natural movement, while others map out a character’s complete bone structure so during a fall they can bend and contort based off how they dropped and objects in their path. Quoting Catherine Goode: “Ragdoll’s save a lot of animation hours. Imagine having to animate a character dying from every place they could possibly get shot in. Also, where they got shot from! Applying an impulse to the area shot and enabling a ragdoll to naturally fall with that force, creates a close enough illusion.”
The last physics system we will talk about is called projectiles. Projectiles can pretty much be summed up in two words: Angry Birds. Angry Birds was developed based off a physics engine called Box2D. Box2D was created by Erin Catto, and is an open-source C++ simulation engine that has many features including collision detection. Collision detection is a major application of physics in gaming, which does exactly what the name implies. As stated above, Box2D is an open-source program, which means anyone can download, use, and build off of for free. In 2012, the owners of Angry Birds declined a $2,500,000,000 buyout from Zynga, which shows just how much value the game series has created for them. How much of the profits did Eric Catto see for his pivotal role in creating the engine Angry Birds is based off? None. It’s open-source, remember?
If physics is such an important part of gaming, then why don’t game developers make exactly real-to-life physics systems for every single video game? There are multiple reasons, and an example of one is this: if you create too many particles with laws, the processing load it will take up can leave little room for other aspects of your game. Asking game designer and physics expert Catherine Goode this, she explained that in commercial gaming plenty of consumers are playing on older computers or mobile devices. This can lead to slower frame rates and choppy game play, not to mention the impossible amount of production time it would take to complete exact, real world physics. Another reason is that sometimes real life simply is not as fun. “A typical example is creating a space game,” Catherine told me, “if you just used real physics, the game may be difficult to control (so potentially not playable by a younger audience), or maybe space travel will take too long (like hours or days rather than a few seconds).”
While some physicists leave school to work on nuclear fusion or financial simulations for major banks, I for one am glad that a few decide to dedicate their knowledge to the production of video games and the physics engines that run them. From moving foliage and waterfalls that look exactly like Niagara, to an exploding brick building and the animations that accompany it, physics is an essential part of the video game industry. Like a great meal from a top chef, a video game is only as good as the combination of all its aspects. An amazing looking character model that has no shadow or doesn’t stop when colliding with a wall is a lot like a pizza without sauce or cheese; something is missing. So break out the Champaign, and let’s toast to the could-be rocket scientists who help you spend hours in a virtual reality that feels exactly like the real world.
Learn more about Catherine Goode at gplus.to/catherine.goode