What I Did On My Summer Vacation

School is back in session and the teacher is having all the kids write about what they did over the summer. So here's my assignment. Well no wait, that's a lie. Actually I'm done with school now. I got the final credit for my AA degree in Game Design by interning at Garage Games. You hear that? Two Year Game Design Degree! Any job I want is instantly mine now (yeah, I had no idea what I wanted to do with college).

I haven't posted a blog since the end of May. Back then I had just gotten accepted as an intern. And if anyone was wondering about the stuff I was working on (yeah I know it's not likely), I haven't really touched it in months. But I do plan on porting it up to 1.5 and hopefully fixing some of the things I broke in the process. So back to the point at hand what did I do at GG this summer?

Firstly, and most importantly I believe, I rocked at Guitar Hero. I'd been excited about coming down since Mr. Davey Jackson had informed me the game had become a staple on the office's recreational/testing area. And most duly, did I rock. I never lost a single head to head match in my time here. The pictures of GH Magnus put up from Not-IGC were on my TV and controllers. I was worried the in-office setup would was insufficient and too out of the way for anyone to play. So I dragged my own setup into the hallway, and much rocking was had. Eric Fritz was cool enough to bring in the demo of GH II as well. The two player co-op mode is phenemonal. I am eagerly anticpating it's release in a month or so.

My fanboyish Guitar Hero ramblings aside, what did I contribute to GG beyond face melting faux riffs? Well after a week or so of finding my way around the office, I ended up with the TGB Docs and Demos team. My first major task was the enviable position of reviewing and fixing up the documentation for the TGB 1.1 release. Once that was out of the way, we needed to start developing some new demos for TGB. Luckily we were deficient of free coders at the time, so instead of testing this work, I got to start making it.



Now, I had never used TGB/T2D in any of it's incarnations prior to interning here. I did have a solid background in TGE, especially Torque Script, and had gone over the docs already, so I had a good starting point. But wow. There were times I would feel like I was "cheating" at game development somehow. This was too easy. Sure I occasionally ran into minor hitches, but the existing level of documentation and forum threads meant I could find most things I needed in a manner of minutes. And the documentation is looking to see a nice overhaul in the nearish future. Though admittedly, it was nice to be able go ask the people who make TGB if I wasn't sure about something ;P.



The thing I quickly found, is that TGB is fantastic for prototyping. You don't have the complexity of dealing with the script<->source networked environment in TGE. You don't have to write all your own basic rendering, physics and collision from scratch. And you're also not nearly as limited as some "simpler" development environments that shall not be named. Of course there are some bugs in TGB you might run into, but you can usually get something at least functional, and then work on ironing it out. I also feel Torque Script's flexiblity really shines in TGB. Being able to tweak and test code so easily is great for trying new ideas out and figuring if they will work.



I've worked on a few different kinds of games while here. Some of them might be released soonish, some of them not for a while. I was surprised that I had the most fun working with the dreaded "casual puzzle game". The design for many of these games is fairly standard, so you know the basics of what needs to be done. But finding out how to best implement them in TGB was quite entertaining. For example, what about games that use a hex grid instead of a standard square grid? I found that with a few logical tweaks, you could write a hex based system around the normal square tilemaps in TGB pretty easily. Mind you this is all entirely in script. No you can't display the tiles themselves as hexic pieces. But the tilemap still served as a great map editor and a template for interaction between the world space and your logical "grid space". If anyone is interested, I've tried to write some of the code around this to be reusable, and I believe I could post it up on TDN.



Another thing I'd found in TGB that I would strongly suggest anyone to take advantage of, is the integrated joypad support. I grew up on consoles, and 2D games in particular have always had a much stronger attachment to me when played with a controller. I try to add joypad support to all the demos I work on. A rafting game becomes much more visceral when you have dual analogue sticks controlling the paddles. A puzzle game feels more solid shifting the pieces around with large buttons and joystick movements. It's not a mechansim you can really to base a commercial PC product around, but it's a fun alternate control scheme to play around with.



So I'm leaving the office for the last time in a little while now. I'm going to really miss the laid back work environment, and being able to take a Guitar Hero break whenever I needed. Hopefully I'll be able to stick around in a spectral capacity, and still contribute to TGB a bit. And as usual, I'll still hang around the forums and try to answer the rare question that falls into my realm of knowledge (hey I'm nearing 1000 posts =D). My proffesional future is a bit up in the air, but I'm a little more hopeful now I'll be able to find work better than restocking a grocery store. Keep having fun making games every one. I'll be around.

<edit>Wow. I absolutely fail at trying to use image align</edit>