Video Game Developer Glossary "F"

Glossary by George Spanos with Special thanks to Xan

Suggest a term here

Foley:

The process by which mainly "real life" sound effects are performed to on-screen action. This term has its roots from the early days of film and was pioneered by Jack Foley, after which the process is named. Foley artists will watch cued-up segments of a scene and re-create the on-screen actor's actions in real time. Actions like footsteps, doors and window openings, guns being loaded and cocked, etc, are all examples of what Foley artists will seek to emulate. Because film sets are often very noisy it is not always possible to employ recordings that are made while the actors are performing a scene. Thus, many of the aforementioned sounds will be recorded in a controlled recording facility (studio) by a recording engineer while a Foley artist performs.

Foley is now commonly performed by sound designers in video games to add the same elements of realism to the gaming experience. Footsteps, clothing movements, and various other actions are performed to enhance the gaming experience. Quite often sound designers will use Foley as a basis for constructing other sounds such as in monster and alien designs.

FPS:

First Person Shooter. This type of game does not separate the player from the action on screen. It is as if the player is the one controlling the gameplay as there is no on-screen representation of the player (avatar). Some popular FPS games include Doom, Call of Duty, and Bioshock.

Frontend:

In game development this usually refers to the opening title plates and the menu screen that are displayed to the player when a game first loads. The menu portion of the frontend will typically include: a main title screen, with the game's logo and a prompt to "press start" followed by; the main menu which might give the player the choice of starting a new game, loading a saved game, entering a multiplayer game, and/or going to an options menu.

The term 'frontend' probably derives from the programming term, which refers to a layer of code in any program that provides interface (usually graphical) to the user. So the graphics and related code in the Windows operating system is Windows' frontend. A browser's rendering of a web page can be said to be a website's frontend.

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