Plan for David Cobb

Field Crumpets Reloaded

So, after about three fourths of a year as a professional game developer I'm finally getting back into the swing of my own project at home. No one on this site would be familiar with it, so I'll just give a brief description.

It's a game based on a field sport that a few groups of my friends made up and play. www.fieldcrumpets.com To sum the game up, players chase the crumpet (a ball) around a field (similar to soccer) with crumpet sticks (husky hitter whiffle ball bats). No hands, no feet. Pushing and tripping are legal. All disputes are solved by farkling (rock, paper, scissors). It's full-contact, great exercise, and a blast to play.

I started this game as a summer project not last year, but the year before that. It was part of my "I'm going to finish a game damnit" initiative. In the end it became a demo on my job application. After I started work, I just didn't have the time or inclination to work on it. Now that I've got this college to work transition pretty much sorted, I'm getting that itch again. The siren song of lone wolf/indie game development.

I'm finding that this time spent as a professional programmer has immensely increased my productivity. My task velocity (time spent / time estimated) is around .68 for tasks estimated before I stopped working on it. For those unaquainted with the concept of task velocity it is simply a measure of the time it actually takes you to do something versus the time you think it would ideally take. In general the average is assumed to be around 3. These are all just estimates that I'm beating, but I really do think it would've taken me that long before to do some of these things.
Even though I've only really been back at it this week (last month I got the project set back up and got source control back online), I've made progress that I was worried wouldn't ever get made. Instead of the game taking a dismal year and a half to be even playable (according to my initial estimates), it's looking more in 3-6 month range for something significantly further along than I was thinking. Let's hear a round of applause for practice.

I'd finish this post with some screenshots, but I'm posting this remotely and to be quite honest, the graphics are pretty rough/temporary anyway. I'm going to be tinkering around with some improved graphics this weekend and if that pans out then I'll post them here. I'd post a demo but there are still gameplay bugs of doom that render the game almost pointless.

Oh and if anyone cares, this is not using Torque2D, but my own engine built on top of a number of libraries. I'll resume my playing around with Torque2D at some later time. Heh, might even post some screenshots from that instead. I like T2D, but TorqueScript isn't my favorite thing ever and I don't want to spent time porting something from a perfectly-capable engine to something else. Networking is really the main bullet on my list of things I want before I'll do any serious work with the engine.