Plan for Christopher Randolph

Inaugural .plan

I've been putting off game development for years now. I bet that story sounds familiar to a lot of folks here...

During high school it was all I could think about, but I never invested the effort in developing the skills necessary to pull it off. I worked for Electronic Arts, made contacts, but it never came together. I worked for 3DO, and still I didn't get any closer to my dream. At some point I had a team culled from contacts I'd made in the gaming industry, but it just didn't happen. A lot of my experience left me rather disenchanted (3DO does that to a man), and the dream lay forgotten in the shadowy depths of my brain.

Now I'm making it happen.

A couple weeks ago, I found myself avoiding work, and once again looking for a game that didn't exist... A game I was dying to play. One moment I was bitching to a friend who works for a large-game-publisher-who-shall-remain-unnamed, and the next I was writing a design doc and drawing up the first interface mock-ups. At first I just wanted a good pitch for a game developer, with the hopes of securing a job based on it. Pretty soon, I was figuring out just how hard it would be to pull this off all by myself. That's what led me here.

After untold contemplation, concentration and general curmudgeoning, I took the plunge and purchased a license to the Torque2D game engine . It's now a week later, and I'm finally starting to feel settled in around here, so I figured it was time to start filling in goofy things like this plan that nobody's going to read. :)

The good news: The engine is every bit as flexible and easy to work with as I might've hoped. I have all of the tools necessary to finish the job (except maybe a windows compiler). The initial design phase is nearing completion, and I can move on to prototyping soon.

The bad news: ...Ummmm... the GarageGames site doesn't seem to like Opera too much. That's a shame. My keyboard and mouse have been irritating me recently, but I've thus far managed to avoid smashing them to bits. That's about it.

The Project: -= Where None Have Gone =-
As for the project, I don't really want to talk about it too much until I have something playable. I don't know if that's pragmatism or superstition, but either way it'll have to suffice. From what I've gathered lurking around here though, folks are going to be pretty excited when I finally let the cat out of the bag.

Keep your eyes open. I promise it'll be good.

Until next time,
Chris "Spectre-7" Randolph