Filling in the gaps a bit...

So I wanted to put something down as far as some kind of progress meter for this project that Donald and I are working on.

No one in this community really knows me, but I've pretty much been Donald's "silent" partner for about the last 10 months. I have some background in programming, but sadly my professional career has been almost 100% tech support. That being said, though, I consider myself an avid PC gamer (with some occasional console time), and I've been playing games since the early 80s. I first started on Apple IIe and IIc systems, then got a Commodore 64 at home, then went to PCs and never looked back. I actually started writing my first game when I was about 12. It was a text adventure along the lines of Infocom's Enchanter and Zork titles. It never really saw the light of day, unfortunately, but I certainly had fun trying. It's only been in the last year or so that I've really rekindled my interest in actually making games.

Now that the brief history lesson is over, if I had to sum up our progress in one word, I'm afraid that word would inevitably be: slow. It bothers me sometimes that we're barely moving, but at least I still feel like we are moving. We have a concept artist and a 3D artist now, so that's got the gears going a little bit. Our 3D artist tends to have more free time than the rest of us, so he's hungry for more concept art and the OK to model what we approve. I picked up The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque at B&N the other day (sorry Donald, that was the only copy they had), and I'm really trying to dive into it.

I work a 4-day, 10-hour-per-day week with 3 consecutive days off, and I really hoped to make some progress on our game, but I ended up trying to play catch-up and relearn what I knew about TGE so far. (I just finished a C# class, and I had started getting confused between Torque and C#, so I dropped Torque for a while.) It was really disappointing, but then, realistically, my approach to this has been like somebody trying to "jump right in" on a quantum physics career. It's just not that simple. I keep putting aside the books in favor of trying to toy with the code, then I just get annoyed when it doesn't do what I want.

I'm now taking a few steps back and going over the basics yet again. If anything, it's a refresher, but I'm already liking the style of Maurina's book more than that of the 3DGPAiO book. Ultimately, I think both with be very useful, even if just for reference, but I think TGPGtT will be a more informative "cover to cover" read.

All in all, this post is just to say that progress is slow, but it's progress nonetheless. We're still focused, and our friends and families are very supportive of our efforts. We've got our domain set up with SVN and some private forums where we can have all our ideas written down. (Now if I can only get Donald to actually post there....)

Thanks for reading, and go Torque your heart out. (ew?)