Plan for Ben Versaw

GID 17 - Beverages and the chaos that follows.

Image Heavy .plan, that's your warning ;)

Well it's been a while since GameInADay has been held on weekend that was easy for me to actually get some work done.

I started off struggling with how to get a game that would fit into the theme of Beverages. After a while I finally had my idea and started running with it.

I decided on a game that was completely beyond my abilities to code in C++ in 24 hours so I was faced with a choice. Either go with Conitec's 3DGS Engine that I'm completely familar with or use TGE which I'm still working on learning. Needless to say I decided that what better way to learn TGE than to use it for a GID.

One of the first "problems" I came across with scaling. The models I created in Milkshape proved to be much too big. This was simple to fix of course. But I kept on forgeting to scale down through-out development.


About an hour into my GID I managed to hook Dennis, a game developer I work with often, into creating artwork for the game.

I faced one of my first hurdles of not knowing the TGE engine very well when I tried to code item rotation. Even with some suggestions from IRC I managed to waste almost an hour trying to get it in and then gave up.

Five hours after I had started work (with breaks in between) I had my first "playable" version of it. I had the first obstacle in the game, ice blocks. And the Firy Drink powerup and a finish line.





I started adding in help messages like above to help people figure out what the game was actually about.

Shortly after I packed up what I had called "Demo1" for further reference. I came across a strange error where my GUI would not be added to the game and claimed it had an error in a perfectly fine script. After posting in the IRC channel it was agreed that they was apparently no error. After looking at it, it was suggested I simply copy the code off the paste site back into a new script file and over ride my old one. This amazing worked and I had problem explained to me as a extended char problem.

Sometime later that night TinyIRC decided to become possessed and only print a mix of characters to the string rather than my text. This happened just when I needed help in the chat room and I ended up having to reboot to fix it.

It was decided that I needed some sort of jump power-up and so I discussed what should be used with some fellow developers over MSN. It was suggested that Caffeine was perfect so I went to work on the new powerup.



Near midnight of the first day I decided to try to throw in badies. I modeled a simple one and threw it in. Unfortunatly by this time my teleporter still didn't work so I deleted it from the level. Everything worked, even the screen telling you how valuable you had to be to activate it. But I couldn't get the level to change.

Screens of the poorly made Badie, and the now deceased teleporter.



When I started work back up Sunday Dennis rejoined me and we started working on new levels. These levels were created in 3DGS and I planned to export them to TGE via quark. I suceeded but they ended up being unusable for the game for a varity of reasons.

The Badie I was trying to put in, ultimately wasn't finished as I became puzzled on how to get any AI logic done in torque-script at all. This was frustrating to me because I regularly work on AI projects using other engines and I consider it one of my best skills in the 3DGS engine.

After showing Dennis our current progress he complained that the player couldn't move while in air so I searched GarageGames for a c++ modification to fix that and put it in the engine to keep him happy. This was my first successful modification of the TGE engine and was done during a GID!

I still have time left... but today is becoming rather hecetic with family coming over and school tommorrow (and me with homework still) so I decided to cut it short. Maybe I'll come back and finish the game for fun later but overall this has been a great learning experience with TGE.

Link to demo

Thanks to all the other GID'ers and their extremely helpful advice for getting out of some of the problems I described above. Also would like to send a thanks to Dennis for helping me with the art side of things, it's easy to see what he created. Everything horrible was created by me or default, the few good items are completely his creation.