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Hope
Student
Landrum, South Carolina
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how do you put cutscenes in video games
im khalen, i am a fan of sonic games #game-design #video-games #video-games
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Joseph Neilson
Radiation Detection Physicist
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Oxford, England, United Kingdom
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Joseph’s Answer
That depends on the game and your role in its development. Many games these days are built around a game engine and/or development toolkit, which has already done the finer details of the coding, and gives you sets of options and actions that can be triggered in different ways. Exactly how what toolkit you use and how it works will depend on the game you're working on. In that sort of structure, the story, cutscenes and some of the level design can be done by a game designer who can be more focused on the story and less on the programming. However, if you're not working with a toolkit or it doesn't do what you need, you might need to think about the bare-metal coding behind it.
The starting point for most cutscenes is some kind of Trigger event. In programming terms, this will be an IF-THEN-ELSE function. Most toolkits will have trigger options based on many different things. Common things to trigger a cutscene would be things like entering a new area, damaging an enemy, getting killed, picking up an item, getting a certain score, or any number of similar things.
Once you've triggered a cutscene, then you've got to decide what's going to display. Many games play a pre-rendered video clip - this can be in game footage, actors filming a live action sequence in the real world, or computer generated graphics rendered separately from the game. Alternatively, you can make a cutscene using the game world - usually the computer takes control over the characters and plays out a defined sequence of actions and events, manually scripted by the designer.
Finally, you need to think about what needs to change in the game before handing control back to the player. If the cutscene has changed the characters or environment in some way, this needs to be reflected in the game. For example, if the cutscene shows a character picking up something, you should either add it to the inventory, or perhaps update the character's texture model to show them with the new item. If part of the environment is damaged in the cutscene, maybe replace that part of the level with rubble before handing back control; or any other changes like that, so the experience makes sense from the players' perspective.
The starting point for most cutscenes is some kind of Trigger event. In programming terms, this will be an IF-THEN-ELSE function. Most toolkits will have trigger options based on many different things. Common things to trigger a cutscene would be things like entering a new area, damaging an enemy, getting killed, picking up an item, getting a certain score, or any number of similar things.
Once you've triggered a cutscene, then you've got to decide what's going to display. Many games play a pre-rendered video clip - this can be in game footage, actors filming a live action sequence in the real world, or computer generated graphics rendered separately from the game. Alternatively, you can make a cutscene using the game world - usually the computer takes control over the characters and plays out a defined sequence of actions and events, manually scripted by the designer.
Finally, you need to think about what needs to change in the game before handing control back to the player. If the cutscene has changed the characters or environment in some way, this needs to be reflected in the game. For example, if the cutscene shows a character picking up something, you should either add it to the inventory, or perhaps update the character's texture model to show them with the new item. If part of the environment is damaged in the cutscene, maybe replace that part of the level with rubble before handing back control; or any other changes like that, so the experience makes sense from the players' perspective.