I’m planning to write my master’s thesis on video games but I’m not sure about the topic.
I was thinking about dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) or automatic level generation but after some time of literature studying it appeared for me that DDA is poorly needed for majority of games and its’ purpose contradicts with acting the way that player wants. Automatic level generation seemed to be good only for very specific games.
I am not familiar with news of games development, I am not sure what problems video games encounter these days or what needs to be improved.
That’s why I’m hoping you guys may offer some suggestions of a problem or improvement which could be realised just by one person and would have an impact for games/some category of games.
Hello, your question is very broad. Game development is a wide world, from puzzle games to question games, to shot’em up, to platforms, to sports (played or managerial), to menagerial games (as sim city), to rpg, to mmorpg, Game development is changed alongside the machines development. Once when the most advanced pc was a C64 or a ZX Spectrum the games had to fight with the memory limitation, and for bigger games was necessary to load further levels (and the player had to wait also a couple of mins for that). When the pc started to have faster processors and more ram the game makers could use better graphic and also more complicated math functions (to move a 2d sprite is more easy than a 3d object).For example, if you want to make a soccer manager you need a lot of math to simulate the result of matches, but if you want to show also the game like in tv with 3d players you need a lot more of math functions. You can say that more powerful pc leads to the need of an improved graphic. In the near future will leads to holograms games or capsules for virtual reality… Enchanced reality is already surfacing. So your question leads to a wide world but the basic is always the same, you need a good idea (not important if is simple or not) the imagination to visualize the game, and the competences to realize that. That’s the reason why most of the game concept are never developed coz the first 2 steps often don’t find the competences to realize that. Why is that? Coz non professional developers start with own idea of a game and rarely they switch to develop the idea of someone else. That’s just my opinion anyway
My master’s thesis was also related to games. I was working on simulating swarm behavior so my thesis was basically a game in which you controlled a swarm of bees. Not a thesis that would have an impact on game development in general but it was quite fun to work on it and my professor at the time was quite happy with it.
You can find open problems about game development by checking out GDC presentations, SIGGRAPH presentations or papers on Artificial Intelligence. These are usually pretty advanced and not necessarily directly related to games but usually there are some papers that are worth looking into in more detail and maybe try to implement them.
