The pathway into professional gaming is an important bridge in creating more opportunities for players. Unfortunately, when it comes to esports, that pathway isn’t as well defined as it is in more established sports industries.
Wim Stocks better outlines the disparity using the talent pipeline in baseball:
“If you want to play baseball, you want to be a professional baseball player in Major League Baseball, you know what to do. You start at T-ball when you’re six years old. You go to little league. You play for your high school. You play for your college. You play Minor League ball.”
According to Stocks, this pipeline isn’t nearly as defined in esports. Luckily, the work he’s doing with World Gaming and Collegiate Star League (CSL) is aiming to turn that around.
“You could say we act like the NCAA of esports,” Stocks explains. “We organize leagues. Every game is a league, no different than there is an NCAA football league. In our case, there’s a CSL League of Legends league. There’s a CSL Counterstrike league. There’s a CSL Dota 2 league. There’s a CSL Madden league.”
These leagues aren’t just to host competitive matches – they’re designed to help aspiring players get better while creating a global gaming society. The collegiate leagues are open to college students. Like other major collegiate sports, the aim is to build an infrastructure around creating enthusiasm for esports, developing talents, and presenting clear opportunities for those who want to take their gaming to another level.
As for what adopting this model means, Stocks is clear about what the future of the esports talent pipeline could look like:
“The more this starts to look like traditional sports that have a template – that have a built-in infrastructure and tremendous understanding – the more we can model that for esports.”

According to Dan Shefelman, 3-D game design revolves around an important process: creating dimensional assets. This includes objects and environments but also characters.

“A 3-D CG character in gaming or animation is essentially a puppet,” says Shefelman. “Inside that puppet, you’ll find what’s called a rig. The rig is attached to the 3-D mesh defining the puppet’s geometry.”

The animator’s job involves manipulating the parts of a character and creating behaviors for different movements. Shefelman also points out some conceptual parallels between three-dimensional characters and real creatures. “The best way to think of a rig is as a human or animal skeleton. It has bones with joints that fit into sockets, and they can move.”

Shefelman further describes the existence of a hierarchy governing a rig’s joints. “One joint is parented to another. If a joint at the base of a finger moves, a child of that joint, like one at the tip of the same finger, might also move. The joints can also move independently, just like what happens in nature.”

According to Shefelman, modeling on the computer feels similar to working with clay. “You start with some kind of lump,” he says. “In a tool like ZBrush, this takes the form of a sphere. In Maya or 3D Studio Max, you generally begin with a cube. From there, you begin to extrude, or pull, the shapes outward one by one. After pulling out one shape, which we call pulling points, you’ll move on to the next. A typical workflow consists of pulling the points of a polygon and adding more vertices as you build the shape. Or you can focus on pulling complex forms, like a character’s limbs. With either approach, you’ll mold the starting shape into something that becomes your model.”

Animation for film, TV, and linear storytelling is you controlling the character, creating keyframes for the posing, and carefully planning it out.

Animation in gaming is about creating a character or an object that has certain behaviors assigned to it so that it will behave a certain way when you control it.

Animation in the gaming industry takes a cold, dead environment and breathes life into it. Animation is not just how your player moves through the world; it’s also the world interacting back with the player.

People tend to think about the obvious, walking around or dancing, but animation is so much more powerful than that.

For instance, you’ve got an ax that you’re swinging. If you go up to a tree and swing the ax and nothing happens, you’re probably going to think that you can’t knock the tree down. If, instead, the tree wiggles and shakes a little bit, you’re going to swing that ax again.

You feel like you’re engaging with the environment, and the environment starts feeling real. You’re also cluing players into the game mechanics and which actions they can take.

You swing the ax again. This time the tree shakes harder – you’re going to swing it again. You have positive reinforcement that swinging the ax does something, and you should keep doing it until the payoff.

There’s a huge team that works on all these projects within the esports industry. And at every level of gaming education and planning, they have to consider the gaming experience.

A character designer and a modeler work together to create the characters, make them look appealing, scary, or whatever the game requires.

Next, the rigger puts in a rig, a skeleton that goes inside the mesh, the skin of the character, and creates movement. Then, the character receives its texture. Textures give the feel of leather, skin, or cloth, and they create the mood, the sense of danger, or lightness, of comedy.

Animation in gaming is different from animation in television and feature films. Each step in the process must take into account the materials of the objects or characters.

For example, as online gaming education teaches, characters made of metal will move a certain way based upon the characteristics of the metal. A program (coding) will determine how a metal character will interact with its environment.

The environment must be specified as well. Is it metal, wood, or ground? Gravity is also critical; it’s the most important part of physics regarding how a character moves.

If you’re on Jupiter, you’re going to move very slowly. If you’re on Earth, you’re going to move like we’re used to seeing people move. If you’re on the moon, you’re going to move lightly.

All of these details get programmed into the game. Whether it’s an esports, 2D, or 3D game, these things give the character the performance that makes the game exciting.

[Please embed: https://pixabay.com/images/id-5091194/ ]

Game development has become a very welcoming environment. The game engine is the hub that runs the entire game and makes your game assets work. Anybody can develop a game as there are many different types of game engines and environments available.
If you are an aspiring game developer just starting out, you may want to check out Unreal Engine. This is a popular engine that is good for starters in that it is a bit more user-friendly. Unreal Engine involves less technical aspects to it as compared to other engines.
Another popular game engine that quite a few people know about is Unity. This game engine has a platform that allows you to create game characters. You can also add physics to the game assets using Rigidbody dynamics, and you can make your characters do different things by adding some code to your program.
If you don’t want to install a hefty software application on your computer, there are a whole host of game development engines that are web-based. You would simply go onto an internet browser, type in the URL, and then start coding. Once you’ve created your app or game, you simply download your file.
MIT App Inventory is a form of Scratch, which uses a block-based programming language for you to create apps and games. You drag and drop various blocks to build the code needed to run your creation.
Flowlab is another web-based application. Using Flowlab you can create game characters, add different movements for those characters, and create a full-fledged game. You can also access this application on your phone.
If you start working for first-party studios in the gaming industry, such as PlayStation, Naughty Dog, or Rockstar, you may work with proprietary game engines that these studios have created themselves.

“Some game engines are better for creating great, giant worlds,” says Genevieve Johnson. Unreal was initially known for that, whereas Unity’s metier was smaller, boutique 2D games that could render smoothly on a tablet.
“But what we’re seeing today is that Unity’s excellent for creating large, 3D games. And Unreal can create wonderful games for your phone,” continues Johnson, “It then becomes a question of, how strong are you in coding?”
One thing that Johnson particularly likes about Unreal is its visual scripter.
”I tend towards using Unity as my game engine because I find it to be programmer-friendly. Whenever I have a unique mechanism that I want to work on, I can effortlessly write the code from scratch. That may be more difficult for some people. But to me, it’s very freeing,” says Dan Shimmyo. Unity enables him to try lots of things in a flash.
Malik Forte’s advice to anybody trying to decide between Unreal and Unity is that if you’re looking for accessibility and don’t want to get too deep into learning a code language, then Unreal is the way to go. It’s a lot more accessible and easier to use.
“Unity is for more veteran developers who understand coding language and are further along with working with game engines,” he says.
So, for someone who is just getting started and wants to get an idea of how a video game engine works, according to Forte, Unreal is the way to go to get the hang of things.
“If you want to move on to something bigger like Unity, you can do that later,” says Forte.