per production techniques

Unit 1: Pre-Production techniques for the creative media industries – Finance – Task 1

Hardware

Unreal Development Kit – this development kit is very popular in the gaming industry due to the fact that hundreds of games have been made through this development kit.

The unreal development kits are free, but you will have to pay royalties when your game is released. If you earn £3000, you have to pay 5% to ‘Unreal’.

The minimum requirements for Unreal Development Kit are:

Processor:                         2.0+ GHz processor

RAM:                                  2 GB system RAM

Hard Drive Space:            3 GB free hard drive space

Operating System:          Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista or Windows Vista 64 SP2

Unity Development Kit – this development kit is also very popular due to the high quantity and quality of games produced that were created on this kit. There are version that are free, but some features aren’t available to those users unless they pay.

The minimum requirements for the Unity Development Kit are:

OS: Windows XP+, Mac OS X 10.7+, Ubuntu 12.04+, SteamOS+

Graphics card: DX9 (shader model 2.0) capabilities; generally everything made since 2004            should work.

CPU: SSE2 instruction set support.

Web player supports IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and others.

iOS: requires iOS 6.0 or later.

Android: OS 2.3.1 or later; ARMv7 (Cortex) CPU or Atom CPU; OpenGL ES 2.0 or later.

WebGL: Desktop version of Firefox, Chrome or Safari

Windows Phone: 8 (available but deprecated for 5.2), 8.1 or later

Windows Store Apps: 8 (available but deprecated for 5.2), 8.1 or later

This development kit costs £75 a month if you have the professional kit, but there are other kits to choose from such as the free version.

Game Maker Studio – this development kit is more for starter game developers and it only can produce 2D games. This kit is free, but there’s a professional and a collection version which requires payment. It also costs to port your game to consoles and devices.

The minimum requirements for Game Maker Studio are:

Program:

Windows XP or above

512MB RAM

128MB graphics

Screen resolution of 1024×600

Internet connection for some features

Windows:

Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8

512MB RAM

128MB graphics

Mac OS X

Mac OS X computer required for export

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

1GB RAM

Autodesk Maya 2015 – this development kit is mainly used to create and modify models for a game and render them. This kit is free, but there are alternative options.

The minimum requirements for Autodesk Maya 2015 are:

Operating system

Microsoft Windows 7 (SP1), Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Professional operating system

Apple Mac OS X 10.8.5 and 10.9.x operating system

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 WS operating system

Fedora 14 Linux operating system

CentOS 6.2 Linux operating system

Browser

These browsers are recommended to be the most recent version.

Apple Safari web browser                                          Google Chrome web browser

Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser              Mozilla Firefox web browser