Rethinking Scenes in Game Development
Disclaimer: This article is based on my opinions about the term "scenes" in game development, and why the term "spaces" will appear in the game engine I am developing.
This article will present the general idea about why I plan to not use scenes in the game engine I am making and will instead prefer to think of them as "spaces".
To me the term "scenes" when thinking about games has always confused me. This is probably due to the way I view games and how I compare them to the world at large. Games consist of large worlds and stories that echo many aspects of real-life, so this has always made me feel that these worlds are full of many different things waiting to be discovered. These large spaces can consist of dynamic features such as talking to NPCs, other players, environmental features, and stories. To me, all of these features are grouped under the context of the local "region" that the developers of the game created.
For instance, when I think of a space in the real world I think of a room, a vehicle, or a type of environment. These spaces in real-life consist of stories, people, items, animals, plants, and much more. This is exactly what we see in games as well. Now when I think of a scene, I see a given instant in time in which a story is told. These scenes consist of all the same aspects mentioned above, however, a scene is an just an instantaneous period of time. The real-world generally is not, and is way more complex and full of life. This is where some of the confusion of a "scene" in a video game development comes from for me.
To think about games as a collection of spaces instead of scenes, seems much more intuitive to me. This applies even to 2d games. You can have the objects grouped togther by reasoning of how they interact, behave, and the stories they tell.
To summarize:
- Scenes in video games feel like they refer more to an instantaneous period of time, more so than the scope of the area in focus.
- Renaming "scenes" to "spaces" seems like a much better way to understand what is going on, and this will be used in the development of the game engine I am creating.