Exam 98-374 - MTA - Gaming Development Fundamentals
Skills measured
This exam measures your ability to accomplish the technical tasks listed below. The percentages indicate the relative weight of each major topic area on the exam. The higher the percentage, the more questions you are likely to see on that content area on the exam. View video tutorials about thevariety of question typeson Microsoft exams.
Please note that the questions may test on, but will not be limited to, the topics described in the bulleted text.
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Understand game design (25-30%)
- Differentiate among game types
- Console, Xbox, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), mobile games, PC games
- Differentiate among game genres
- Fantasy, sports, role playing, card, board, first-person shooter (FPS)
- Understand player motivation
- Quests, tasks, activities, how to win, game goals
- Design the user interface
- UI layout and concepts, asset management, game state, gamer services
- Understand components
- Differentiate between tool creation and game programming, understand artificial intelligence (AI)
- Capture user data
- Save and restore user data, save and restore game state, handle input states, store data, manage game state, input services
- Work with XNA
- Understand the architecture of an XNA game, use built-in XNA tools, work with XNA hierarchy (initialization, update loop, drawing)
Preparation resources
- Resources for creating a game using DirectX (C++)
- Getting started with XNA Game Studio development
- Games for Windows technical requirements: Best practices for games on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8
Understand hardware (15–20%)
- Choose an input device
- Mouse, keyboard, Kinect, console, mobile
- Choose an output device
- Screen, television, hand-held devices, sound (local speakers, surround sound systems)
- Work with the network
- Set up web services, TCP, UDP, basic management; plan for areas without access to Internet, notifications
- Manage game performance
- CPU versus GPU, reach versus HiDef, graphics networking performance, frame rate
- Understand the different game platforms
- Console, PC, mobile; compare memory management
Preparation resources
- Overview of user input and input devices
- Achieving good performance on different hardware types
- Hardware and platforms
Understand graphics (25–30%)
- Understand rendering engines
- DirectX, video and audio compression, display initialization, resolution (full screen, Vsync, and windowed), transforms
- Plan for game state
- Scene hierarchy engine, gametime to handle frame rate variations, understanding games’ main loop (input/update/render), graphics pipeline; understanding the flow of a game, loading, menus, save-load, configuring options (video, audio, keyboard)
- Draw objects
- Using bitmaps, sprites, vector graphics, lighting, blending, text, textures, 3D geometry, parallax mapping, and different shaders; 2D versus 3D; creating a sprite font
Preparation resources
- Displaying graphics
- Step by step: Developing Windows Mobile game-quality graphics with DirectX
- Windows Game State Management
Understand animation (25–30%)
- Animate basic characters
- Movement, lighting, projections, frames per second (FPS), shaders, apply filters to textures, sprite animation, generate objects from user indexed primitives, matrices, understanding keyframes, motion between keyframes
- Transform objects
- Form, deform, move, point distances, planes, interpolation; frames per second (FPS); translation, scale, rotation
- Work with collisions
- Per pixel and rectangle collisions, collision detection, collision response, fundamentals of physics simulation
Preparation resources
- Animating a sprite
- Transforms how-to topics
- Transformations and collision testing