Behind the Game Credits: teacher key

How Video Games Are Made, grade 11 edition, written for 11th grade. Teams of artists, designers, programmers, sound makers and testers build each game with engines and prototypes. Games go back from today's phones to early computer games.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. What is a prototype used for?
   • To convince others an idea is worth the risk of full production (answer)
   • To translate a game for other players
   • To store a game on a cartridge
2. What did Bushnell and Dabney do instead of using computers that cost over $100,000?
   • Made cheaper custom hardware running a simpler version (answer)
   • Gave up on arcades
   • Used a PDP-1
3. After developers mark a bug as fixed, what does the QA tester do?
   • Closes the report without checking
   • Repeats the same steps to make sure the problem is gone (answer)
   • Starts a new game
4. What do many procedural generation systems recombine?
   • Pieces the designer supplies (answer)
   • Players' names
   • Old save files
5. Which came before arcade Pong?
   • Home Pong
   • Tennis for Two and Spacewar! (answer)
   • The Atari 2600
6. In the passage, what does "assets" mean in: assets such as objects and sounds?
   • Parts of a game, such as objects and sounds (answer)
   • Rules of a game
   • Players of a game

Words

• prototype: idea test
• engine: building platform
• assets: objects and sounds
• procedural: made by algorithms