Plan for Alex Rice

By day, I work the IT helpdesk for a large biotech company. By night, when my 5 year old boy is not beating me at Starfox on N64, I have 2 game designs I am working on and doing all artwork/music/programming myself. Check back in a couple of years to see if I've made any progress :-)

Here is my current workflow/toolchain. I've spent about 12 months, part-time, getting to this point. Maybe it will help others seeking out for the best tools for their needs?


Game engine Torque Game Engine (TGE)

Torquescript editor TribalIDE it's simple, fast, has a really nice debugger for torquescript. What more could you ask for? I also looked at TIDE/Jedit and Eclipse, but once I saw how simple and solid TribalIDE is, this is the one for me.

3d modeling/animation XSI 4.2 Foundation. XSI is so awesome and is finally affordable too. I really like the modeling tools and animation tools, and the interactive/in-application mentalray renderer.

dts exporter while waiting for Matt Summer's XSI exporter to be released, I am using obj2dts to get static/placeholder artwork into my game

dts previewer Torque ShowToolPro - an essential app! It helps a beginner understand LOD, mount points, animation blending, etc!

map/building editor none, yet- my game is mostly out of doors ;-) actually waiting for Torque Constructor and plan to snap that up as soon as it's available

music/sound effects editor Garageband (gotta use my old Mac for something)

inspirational reading (outside of garagegames) Paul Graham, Dexterity Software

games 4 fun Darwinia, Orbz, Starfox64, Legends, Marble Blast

Here is a an interesting thought. Have you ever seen a 30m tall Rio Grande Cottonwood tree?

** warning ** this is just a photograph, not a TGE screenshot ;-)