School's out for summer!

School's out for summer!

Yes, I have a summer job -- of sorts. No, it doesn't pay very well. But it's a heck of a lot of fun!

1. Healthy Kids Videos:

That's the name of the LLC that three of us have created to develop our play-therapy game. We don't have an Internet presence yet, because we're too busy trying to write the game. There's an international play therapy conference in London, England, the same weekend as IGC'06. While I'm at IGC, one of the other partners will be in London showing off our game. I'll bring it to IGC and upload it to the show-and-tell computers.

It won't have the flash and the pizzazz of the other games you've seen built on Torque, because it has a different audience and a different purpose. It really is designed to be a therapeutic tool, and so it straddles the line between "games" and "serious games."

We (well, one of us, and it wasn't me) showed off the storyboard at a national play-therapy conference in April, and it was enthusiastically received. National and international play-therapy experts have agreed to test and endorse the product.

2. Homeland Security

That's not a name; it's a topic. I'm still modeling schools in the district where I teach. Because this was my first year teaching and I spent so much of my after-school time doing schoolteacher stuff (it's a 16-hour-a-day job, and I'm not kidding), I didn't have all the time I wanted to do the modeling. I did some interesting work, though, comparing the effort required to model identical (or nearly so) interiors using QuArK and Cartography Shop. CS is much, much easier -- but you already knew that. But CS has some interesting built-in limitations.

I will be interested in comparing Q and CS to TC when it comes out. I'm patient; I can wait.

I'm modeling the schools because emergency services in this state are deadly serious about avoiding another Columbine-type incident. If police can run through an accurate 3D mock-up of the school before they have to send personnel into the real thing, it could save lives.

When I'm finished with the models, I will demonstrate them to district emergency services people. If they decide they want to use it, I'll probably apply for a grant for an indie license for the district, and donate the models to them.

3. Testing, reviewing, and learning

Yep, I'm doing a lot of that. I haven't had this much fun since HP put me on the beta test teams for the HP-42S and HP-48 series calculators.

Lemme put in a plug here for Ed Maurina's book. One single word sums it up: Wow.

This book may work for the novice, but I'm not a novice anymore, so I'm not qualified to judge that. But it's extremely useful as a tutorial, a guide and a reference work for the experienced user. It (book and CD combination) digs deeply enough into the bowels of the machine to satisfy the most hardcore gearhead.

Speaking as a writer myself, I also want to say that the writing and the editing in this book is topnotch. Ken Finney's books are good, of course, but they suffer from poor writing in some spots, and abysmal editing. A good editor would catch a lot of the flaws that have appeared in Finney's books. Poor editing ruins otherwise good books and blemishes the craft.

The wordsmithing craft, that is. People should take writing as seriously as they take game programming. The deterioration of the written word over time is a -- never mind, I'll get off my soapbox now. What I was intending to say was that I have found no wordsmithing flaws in Ed's text at all.

As for the CD, "wow" says it again.

I haven't gotten through the entire book and CD yet, but what I've seen so far gets five stars.

Now, about Torque 2D: Those of us who learned T2D the hard way will consider Torque GameBuilder to be so easy, it's unfair. TGB is a delight to use. It's not perfect yet, but if you know the flaws and can work around them, it's a remarkable tool.

And that's all I'm going to say publicly about testing, reviewing and learning.

Postscript: Torque in the classroom

I teach mathematics in the public school system to 12- and 13-year-olds. One of the connections that I make with my kids is that "they like to play video games, and I like to write video games." That claim is stretching things just a bit, and the kids always clamor for more information when I make that claim. So I tell them about serious games, which is my market niche, and I promise to show them some of my work as the year goes on.

In my grade, we teach the kids about similar figures and scale factors. I love to fire up Torque ShowTool Pro and show them human figures and other objects, and let them adjust the view scale. Then I load TGE with our Copper Mountain ski resort simulation and let them ski around for a while. Skiers in my class recognize the place instantly, because it's one of Colorado residents' favorite resorts.

We also teach about rates and ratios. I use GG's own starter.fps and starter.racing demos to show the kids how changing rates (speeds, mostly, but also weapons damage) affect gameplay. Then I change the relative sizes of objects in the game and show them the visual representations of those ratios. (A relative size is a ratio, you know.)

The kids always get a kick out of it when I bring in my laptop PC, hook it to the projector and dim the lights. Not only is this a good break from the regular textbook curriculum, but it shows them a real-world (well, sim-world) application for what they're learning about.