Diary of a coder 1

I find myself in a position that probably thousands who have come before me find themselves, I am a skilled programmer, passionate about making games, I have what I consider to be the most talented people in my area working with me. I have never developed a "Major" game before, so I will be learning as I go. It is my intention with this Blog to document my path, what I learned, how and when so that those who come after me may have an easir path.

I am a 12 year vet of programming, everything from BASIC on my TRS-80 (oh all the lines of code to animate the slot machine arm) to full scale windows/linux distributed information systems. I have played with game development almost all my life however, only recently has life given me the opportunity to dive right in.

Like most developers I started by planning to write my own engine, well long story short 1 runaway terrain engine that forced a OS re-install and I went looking for a better solution. I found TGE and consider it to be the best money I ever spent.

So again with the short version my team and I set out on figuring out what this Game Dev thing is all about, I quickly start to notice that aside from my music guy I am the only one who has any real computer experience, OUCH.

So heres the team,

Heather - Author

John - Lead Artist

Nathan - Concept artist/weapons master (yes he make real versions of all the games weapons)

Josh - Concept artist

Kevin - Music

Brian - were not sure what he does yet, but he drives and brings us jolt and smokes so we will find him a role

Michael - Myself - Software Engineer/Producer/Modeler and a bunch of jobs I dont know about yet.

Michael D - Marketing/Public relations/Graphic Design

After I met Nathan he mentioned that he had been working on art for a game for about 3 years now, hoping to find a team he could work with :) and with that he pulled out 4 MASSIVE cities each drawn on two 3' x 4' sized pages. WOW.

He then told me that there are 6 more he is working on. Okay so we have a HUGE world, good I wanted one.

So I have started to teach them how to use 3D Studio Max. I thaught we were in good shape, until I realized that Max cannot efficiently be used to build interiors.

So I started working with Quark, I hate it, but I am good with it, I cant wait for Constructor.

We are working on building the cities first, in the mean time I will be working with the engine to expand it to waht we need. I will try to post as often as I can.