Student works designing video game in free time

For most people who delve into the world of video games, they are merely a hobby. They represent an institution of sorts and have, in many cases, taken the place of playing in the backyard. But for Ryan Cheek, video games aren’t just a well enjoyed, albeit temporary, escape from reality, they’re a potential career, one that could become lucrative for him.

The 23-year-old senior computer science major at GCSU is currently working on a short video game demo that he plans to present to Epic Games, headquartered in Cary, N.C. Some of the company’s most prestigious and award-winning games include Gears of War and Gears of War 2.

Epic Games also developed the Unreal Engine, which has been one of the cutting-edge and leading engines in video game design. They also introduced the Unreal Development Kit to the public Nov. 2009, which allows people to design their own games.

For this story, I followed Cheek as he modeled a weapon into his game Absolution. This step is just a miniscule one in a very lengthy process that will most likely take Cheek until his graduation in May 2011, if not longer, to finish.

“Any kind of content I like in my game, I have to program it into the engine, so it’s usable. If it’s a weapon, you have to program it so it can fire,” Cheek said. “You have to program it to act how you want it. I think the biggest ordeal is going to be actually creating the content because I’m not so much of a 3-D modeler as much as I am a programmer. So once I get all the content created, then programming it into the engine won’t be so bad.”

At 9:20 p.m., Cheek sits down at the computer in his room, a room that can only be described as a technological lair, a cave of seemingly unending electronic entities. His computer desk alone has four separate screens— three of them connected —and a bookshelf situated right behind them stuffed mostly with books containing programming and coding information and language. The walls of the room are covered with video game posters and magazine art.

Cheek logs onto Flickr, a free image website, and enters a search for a machine gun model. At 9:22, he finds the gun he’s looking for and pulls it into Adobe Photoshop. After making some initial edits to the image, he imports it into the Blender 3-D program at 9:26. Here, Cheek is using the model as a backdrop to form around his own background.

“I’m adding my own features to the model where it’s like a freelancing type thing,” Cheek said. “So I’m not really copying anybody’s work.”

To add the features he wants to the machine gun, Cheek employs a series of polygonal shapes on the image.

“You want to have as few polygons as possible for space,” Cheek said. “Because the video card renders to space according to the number of individual polygons you have. “

As this tedious process wages on, Cheek becomes quiet, intent and focused on taking the next microscopic baby step to completion of his demo. The only sound coming from the room are repeated mouse clicks and a steady, rhythmic flow of techno music.

“I don’t usually have people in here with me while I’m doing this,” he said. “It’s an all-about-me time, which I kind of enjoy. It’s easy to get wrapped up in it.”

“There are some times we can go days without seeing him,” said Eric Connolly, one of Cheek’s roommates.

At 9:53, the weapon has a somewhat well-defined shape, and it’s time for Cheek to go in and clean it up, weeding out the unnecessary polygons and extra edges.

“I’m not the best in the world at this,” Cheek said. “My main goal is just to get a programming job with Epic because that’s where my best talents are.”

At 10:06, Cheek is done polishing the rough parts and is now ready to give the weapon a 3-D appearance. He is making a low-poly model, one in which the gamer sees their own weapon, whereas high-poly models are what the other gamers see. He switches to poly mode in Blender and selects the entire image. From there he begins the extrusion process, which will give the weapon a cooler 3-D look, and then he saves the file. The weapon still needs some animation done, but Cheek will go back later for that.

“I’m just trying to get the basic layout down,” he said.

At 10:23, Cheek writes a script, a piece of code that a desired program will execute for the weapon to function accurately. He exports the model into a format that the Unreal Development Kit can read and saves it.

At 10:26, Cheek opens up the UDK and puts the weapon into the game as a static mesh.

“Once you get it in and import it to the code, it will work fine,” he said.

This is only a small part to the demo, which Cheek has been working on for about a month and will be for several more months.

“I’ve been creating a lot of textures and materials so that when you look in the game, all the walls and the color you see are textures and materials that I have to create,” he said. “And with classes and all, it’s just going to take me a long time to really get it finished.”

In the end, Cheek plans for the demo to be in the neighborhood of five to 10 minutes long.

“I’ll submit it to them, and let them play it and show them what I can do for their engine,” he said.  “And hopefully, they’ll hire me on.”