Series created by Jane Jensen for Sierra Online back in the good old days of Adventure games. You play Gabriel Knight, a horror writer from New Orleans, who comes from a long line of Schattenjagers (german for Shadow Hunter). This new title throws Gabriel into a new world of supernatural mystery connected to haunting past events and experiences. Currently, there are only 3 games in the series. 1) Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 2) Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within 3) Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned Fans still hope and pray that there will be a fourth volume of this epic story.

Boosting the power of a signal.

Galaga was the definitive triggerhappy space shooter. It was probably the first game to give the illusion of being a topscroller through the use of a scrolling, randomly generated starfield.

Galaga, while no longer popular in its own right long before the advent of the internet, continues to be popular as a "mixing game".

The online version of Game Developer Magazine. Updated regularly with articles from the magazine, as well as new online only articles.

An interactive, self-contained system of rules containing a challenge and a victory condition that defines a focused reality for the purpose of entertainment.

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A conference for industry professionals to gather, do business, attend lectures and round tables given by professionals and schmooze. Abbreviated GDC, this event is hosted by Miller Freeman and information can be found at http://www.gdconf.com/.

Game Developer Magazine is the premier paper publication for the industry.

A program code that runs all aspects of the game.

A entity is a abstract class of an object that can be moved and drawn over a game map

A game mechanic is a rule which defines how a game proceeds. For instance, in Chess, a bishop may move only along the boards diagonals. In the Mario Bros. games, Mario may squish his enemies by stomping upon them. In football, a team loses posession of the ball after failing to advance 10 yards in 4 downs. Each of these rules is a game mechanic.

The Game Programming Wiki (or GPWiki for short) is an online community dedicated to covering material related to games development. This Wiki was created, and is maintained by the creator of the now defunct Lucky's VB Gaming tutorials, but unlike the previous site, covers material in any programming language, as well as a lot of material not specific to any particular language. The GPWiki can be found at www.gpwiki.org.

The way a game moves from beginning towards a (possibly undefined) end. The most common game progression is linear, however many other game progression structures exist.

There are several University type schools for game programming, a list of which be found here;

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Game+ is a game feature that allows a character who has beaten the game to play again, retaining some advantage that zie has earned, or allowing the player to start at a plot-branch point and travel the "road not taken". The first game with this feature that I know of was Chrono Trigger.

A handheld game console created by Nintendo. A second, smaller version was later released. This was the Gameboy Pocket. A third model was called the Gameboy Color. Recently another, more powerful version called the Gameboy Advance was released.

A videogame system created by Nintendo. Released in November 2001.

A game development resource site with articles, tutorials, design diaries and general information for game developers.

GameDev.Net has an IRC channel #gamedev on the AfterNET servers. You can log on to 'irc.afternet.org' with any IRC client. Then type '/join #gamedev'.

The key element in any game, the fact of the game itself, what the player actually does. Examples: Pong - the act of bouncing the dot, which represents the ball, off the line that represents the paddle. Super Mario Bros - moving the plumber around, jumping on heads of enemies, breaking blocks, when trying to rescue the princess.

Meaningful interactions during a game.

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Home to The Ongoing GarageWare Game Festival, GarageDeveloper International is a combination game publisher/organization whose focus is on bringing games developed by garage developers to the marketplace.

Richard "Lord British" Garriot is best know as the creator of the Ultima series of RPGs.

The Ultima series began with Akalabeth (Ultima 0), which was released in 1979. Many sequels followed: Ultima I - IX, and Ultima Online.

One of Richard Garriot's wonderful contributions to game design was introduced in Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (released in 1985). The game kept track of the character's choices and actions. The player's goal was to live a life of virtue. Good actions, such as charity and sacrifice, were rewarded. But evil actions, such as lying or stealing were also taken into account. The player could not complete the game unless he were sufficiently virtuous. While this may sound a bit odd, it was a wonderful innovaiton. It is a rare game which can so successfully boost a player's self-esteem!

The Ultima series has had a profound impact on subsequent games, influencing games such as: Fallout I & II, Baldur's Gate I & II, Icewind Dale, the Final Fantasy series, Neverwinter Nights, Arcanum, Pools of Radiance, and Dark Sun.

Richard Garriot's games usually take advantage of the best available technology. Richard Garriot has recently left OSI, and has founded a new company called Destination Games. This company has formed a partnership with NCSoft, an Asian company.

He is currently working on a translation of NCSoft's Lineage: The Bloodpledge for the U.S. market, a new MMPORPG code-named Tabula Rasa, and the mysterious "Project X".

Game Developer Conference

Graphics Device Interface. The standard way to do graphics within Windows.

An open source 3D engine which has recieved a large amount of community support.

A class of games. Common genres would be the shooter, First Person Shooter (FPS), Role Playing Game (RPG), simulation, Real Time Strategy (RTS)

'Genre-lizing' (or non-US 'Genre-lising') is the act of defining a game to be within a specific genre. This has mainly pertained to the RPG genre, but is not limited to it. Genre-lizing, from a development point of view, is limiting to a designer in that they are forced to include attributes of a game that are associated with that genre and to not include those attributes that are not associated with that genre.

Another term for Phosphor Persistence.

The bloody pieces of meat that fly off of a character when they get shot, chopped, etc., etc. Usage: "After I used my rocket launcher on that demon there were gibs _everywhere_!" Probably derived from 'giblets.'

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Graphics Interchange Format. A format for saving graphics that usually uses a 8-bit (256 color) indexed bitmap.

Can be shortened to GB. 1 GB Approx.: 1 billion bytes

A problem encountered when one tries to rotate using the 3 axises where one ends up rotating in the wrong direction after several rotations.

Common fixes to this problem are to use matrix multiplication for rotations or quaternions.

The OpenGL Auxillary Library. A library including functions to load textures and do other common tasks. It is no longer supported or updated, but it is still used for many beginning OpenGL tutorials.

GLFW is a free, open source, portable framework for OpenGL application development. In short, it is a link library that constitutes a powerful API for handling operating system specific tasks, such as opening an OpenGL window and reading keyboard, mouse and joystick input.

A 3D API developed by 3DFX for their Voodoo chipset.
Glide was once a very popular API, as it was the first available to utilitize hardware acceleration for the general gamer. Since the proliferation of Direct3D and OpenGL, Glide's usefulness has waned because it only works on 3DFX cards.

See OpenGL, Direct3D.

The OpenGL Utility Toolkit. This set of libraries provides a set of helper functions to OpenGL, including methods to abstract the windowing system (for cross-platform development), rendering "standard" 3D objects, etc. For more info, visit the GLUT homepage

gMAX is a powerful subset of the game industry-standard 3D content creation tool ¨C 3d studio max ¨C that will be provided to game players for no charge on the web. gMAX is narrowly targeted at the interactive computer & video games market, and will be based on the next major release of 3d studio max. It is designed to serve as a highly extensible and customizable content creation platform for both professional and consumer use.

Short for The Gang Of Four, who consist of: ¡è Erich Gamma ¡è Richard Helm ¡è Ralph Johnson ¡è John Vlissides They are the authors of the criticly acclaimed book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (ISBN: 0-201-63361-2 Addison-Wesley) When using the term "GOF" one usually means that book. With this book they imprinted the phrase "design pattern" on every programmers mind. It even has its own category here on Game Dictionary, "Design Patterns".

Terminology used when software is burned onto the final CDs that will be distributed and sold. So named because in contract to "gold" CDR discs, the distribution CDs are clear. See Going Gold.

Terminology used when software is burned onto a "gold" cd that will be sent to the CD manufacturers to be reproduced.So named because of the CDR burnable CDs are gold backed normally. See Going Glass.

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The CD that will be sent to the CD manufacturers to be reproduced. So named because of the CDR burnable CDs are gold backed normally.

FPS develped by Rare for the Nintendo 64. Seen by many people as the best fps on the system, and also one of its best overall. The game followed the plot of the James Bond film that it was licensed off, and gave gamers their first real chance to actually BE James Bond. The game is still popular, due to its powerful multiplayer component

The term refers to a glitch in a game. It's a word used by game programers when they come across a problem which causes the screen to sway from side to side on random moments in a game (like the camera was being shaken). Incorrect camera data positions and faulty code cause this rare glitch. Nick Askew was the person who first came across this while beta testing the game Doom. Ever sense then this 1 in a 1,000 chance of occurrence has been called "Gone Askew" (as a side note: many programmers use it as kind of a joke because it refers to "bad" programming and hours of work for it to be corrected)

Also known as intensity interpolation. A shading model where the light intensity is calculated at each of the vertices, and is interpolated across the polygon.

General Protection Fault - CPU error which can be intercepted by the OS to perform different tasks or generate an error. Can be caused by: - a process who violated its assigned resources and tried to access a resource which it was not granted (often unavailable memory due to pointer errors). - a process who tried to acces memory in a lower ring (higher priority, usually kernel memory) The GPF can also be used for memory swapping - the OS catches the GPF involved in reading a memory page which is in the swap file so it loads it into RAM and then resumes execution. Usually a GPF results in a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) in Windows
See Also:BSOD

A form of data representation. Without graphics, we'd just have numeric displays. * Graphics use imagery, such as pictures, lines, points, colors and so on to represent information. It's the difference between a spreadsheet and a pie-chart. The spreadsheet is a numeric representation; the pie-chart is a graphical representation. Since computers see all things as numbers, programmers and electronics engineers have had to design ways to convert those numbers into moving images. The electronics engineers gave us the Graphics Card for this very purpose.

A card which processes graphics for a computer. * A graphics card is given an image in digital form. The card then takes care of converting the digital data and squirting down a cable into a monitor or TV in their preferred analog[ue] form. Modern cards also provide some features which help speed the creation of an image by the computer. For instance, most now have blitters which speed up copying rectangular chunks of memory around from A to B.

An algorithm by which a color is converted into a shade of gray(where R, G, and B are all equal), usually by weighting each of the R, G, and B components by certain percentages.

Graphical User Interface.

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