The Past Year

Well, my last plan was posted back in October roughly a week after I got back from Indie Games Con 2005. I figure it's time to write another about my current endeavors. After IGC and the TSE tech demos I really wanted to learn how to use TSE. I spent the first few months just learning how to use it along with general Torque things. I started generating Atlas terrains, using relief mapping, learning the material system, etc. Shortly after I started work on a small FPS with a friend. We aimed a bit too high and ended up failing. I definitely wasn't ready for a game like that.

By then it was Christmas. I took Jeff Tunnell's advice and bought a new computer with fancy video cards. A must if I wanted to try shader model 3 development. After spending the next 2 months trying to incorporate slightly more difficult resources, Atlas terrains, and Difs into my game I soon learned that this was too much for 1 person.

I took a small break from TSE to try out some of the new shader addons people were doing with the CG language. It was fun to experiment but just didn't feel the same as TSE. Soon it was June and Milestone 3.5 was out. I was so excited when I learned Atlas 2 was in there along with batch rendering. I started work on another unfinished project called Forgotten Lands. (If anyone remembers I made a few forum posts about it. It was basically a dinosaur hunting game.) I was able to make a short and simple demo though I couldn't release it as it violates Daz's EULA. I started work with full screen shaders. After a lot of help from Ray Gebhardt and Josh Moore I was able to do some neat things.

By August I was beginning to code my own simple shaders. I took some programming classes that greatly increased my skills. With IGC only a few months ahead Ben Ewing, Brian Ross, and I started work on a small scale RPG for it. Within the first 2 weeks we had the core gameplay in. We had dialogue, guards, civilians, gold, weapons, a law system, you name it. Only a few weeks after we learned that IGC had been cancelled. That was a huge let down but progress still continued.

Now in the last few weeks Torque Shader Engine Milestone 4 has been released. This has been a huge excitement for me as I was able to do so much with the bloom and DRL values. It's very exciting to see what everyone is doing at Garage Games. And of course, no plan is complete without screenshots. Please mind the place holder art. :)















-Matt Vitelli