Plan for Jay Barnson

The joys of a custom game engine...

Since leaving the "big business" games industry about three years ago. It took me nearly that long to quit thinking of myself as a "game developer." I've been doing some pretty exciting stuff since then, but I have missed writing games for a living. I didn't miss the games INDUSTRY, though. It eats its young.

In the interim, when work wasn't too nasty, I've been working on little hobby projects to keep my game development skills sharp. "Just in case." So I've had a 3D engine I'd been working on in fits and starts. Earlier this year, I decided to put it to use to build a smaller game that I could actually FINISH. Just for grins. At the end of August, I figured I might as well turn this into a business. With luck, all the work I've done on the engine getting this game out the door could save me time on projects 2 and 3.

Recently, I've been beginning to wish I'd gone with Torque or another third-party engine instead. I've spent most of the last month working on problems that COULD have been done for me in Torque. Network play for example. Sure, creating a basic UDP message-passing setup was child's play. But making sure the whole client / server architecture stayed in synch with each other --- that took a whole extra week. Collision detection has always been kinda fuzzy --- last night I wrote a suite of tests to exercise the core hit detection routines and find all the bugs. Before I went to bed last night, all my tests were passing with flying colors. WHEW!

And as time has gone on, my code has become less and less "optimized" as I've quickly retrofitted things in to make the game work. I've also had to face some other challenges that COULD have been solved for me, like writing the code to read in a standard model format instead of my "custom" format. Ah, well. Maybe I should have gone with a third-party engine. Maybe I will next time.

But for now, the engine WORKS, and the game is making TONS of progress. Last night I had two people volunteer their EXCEPTIONAL talents and contributions to this project, so I was floating on cloud nine even while stepping through the debugger to find where my collision checks were breaking. The game is evolving before my eyes - exceeding its original design.