Game in a Day: GG Style!

We know you love making games, if this list is any indication. It's been pretty exciting to see our community get involved with self-started game creation contests, Inspired by all of you, a handful of GarageGames employees decided to run on our own Game in a Day competition. If you're wondering whether we've been ignoring Torque development or the Instant Action beta as we've created our masterpieces, don't worry. Like you, all participating GarageGames employees had to finish their Game in a Day projects off the clock. We tried create an environment that was similar to yours so we could use the experience to make future versions of Torque better.

Some Background

We unofficially started the contest on Tuesday, January 22nd by splitting into three teams of four people each. We chose TGB as the dev weapon of choice, since there were members in each team who had only light scripting experience. Before the weekend, teams could only work on game design, art, and hardware set-up. Reusing code from previous game projects was deemed okay. Then, all participants gathered on Saturday, January 26th at 11 am, and we coded, animated, and gave each other flack well past sunset. Teams were allowed to work Sunday to put the finishing polish on their games, and finally today the three teams met to brag and boast as we showcased our games to each other. In the spirit of Game in a Day, we didn't declare a winner because creating a game is its own reward. (*ahhhhhhh*) Of course, that didn't stop each team from personally declaring itself the winner, but hey, it's good to have pride in one's work, right?

Why didn't we wrap up on Monday? Well, for those of you who've been to Eugene, you know that it doesn't snow often, and when it does, it stops the town. We all worked from home on Monday.


The snowy view from Dan's apartment
So without further ado, here are the teams and their projects:

Garage Quest Ultra Blast

Team Members: Dan Maruschak, Eric Fritz, Michael Blenden, and Deborah Marshall

Game Description: Remember those classic point 'n' click adventure games, like Sierra's King's Quest? This is our warped version of it. Play as Michael Blenden, a real-life "Garage wanderer," in his quest to go home at the end of the workday. When his boss, Karen Peal, asks him to find Brett's expense report before going home, the real fun begins. Michael will have to use deodorizing orange spray to maneuver past the stinky bathroom, find the QA department in an alternate dimension, and rescue a member of the executive team before he will be able to escape the building with his life (and dignity) intact.

Note: The game still has some bugs in it. (It's a prototype, all right?) So make sure you 1) ONLY click on the floor areas and on people and 2) when a conversation starts, don't click on anything and let the conversation play out naturally.


Fritz needs some respite from a noisy co-worker
Development Process and Challenges: The team batted around several game ideas, including a fighting game, but ultimately decided that keeping the game funny and personal would be the most fun. Because the team had only had one experienced programmer, Dan Maruschak, we wanted to keep the game concept simple, and it doesn't get much simpler than point 'n' click adventures. (And even that had its challenges!) The majority of the team spent its time taking pictures and creating static and animated sprites for all the players, objects, and backgrounds for our game.


One scene came from a lot of photographs

Scope creep was the biggest problem with our game. We wanted to add a lot of game functionality at the beginning - including a big 2D style fighting game at the end and more sound support - but Dan spent most of his Saturday just getting the speech bubbles to work properly. A lot of our "want to have" features were cut in the interest of time, although we hope to add them in later. (Does this sound familiar to any of you?) Most of our challenges were just lots and lots of miscellaneous tasks (like getting scene transitions to work right), and they all added up. It's a lot easier to appreciate the work required for big tasks, while the little tasks are easy to dismiss as trivial things that won't take any time. Finally, because of bad snowy weather on Sunday, we couldn't meet together to finish our game as originally planned, and Dan did a lot of the smaller tasks that he was going to teach the rest of us to do because it would have been difficult to explain how to do them over the phone.

Overall, we're pretty proud of Garage Quest Ultra Blast, and we hope you enjoy it too!

Download GarageQuest Ultra Blast here!

Josh Adventure

Team Members: Matt Langley, Channa Langley, Derek Bronson, and Davey Jackson (Mr. Ed)

Game Descriptiont: In Josh Adventure, you play GarageGames CEO, Josh Williams on his perilous quest to launch InstantAction.com. In this "Stealth RPG" you'll have to navigate the GarageGames offices to meet with department heads, while trying to avoid long side conversations with your well intentioned employees. In the spirit of Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, and Metal Gear Solid, you'll have to move from point to point trying to avoid your employees' cone of vision. If you get spotted, you'll enter a "combat" scene where you'll have to simultaneously decrease your employee's "Interest" in talking with you, while maintaining their "Morale." Loosing too much of an employee's morale will give you a "Stress point." If you gain 3 or more stress points, you're off to the funny farm instead of the IA Launch Party.


Josh vs. Davey


You've got to be stealthy to get around the office

Development Process and Challenges: The main challenge we faced for this game was enemy AI. Initially, we wanted to do a Pac Man style chase through the GG offices where the employees chased you in real time. However, for game in a day, we didn't want to spend all of our time on AI pathfinding, so we opted instead to give the employees patrol routes instead. For the combat system, we incorporated a RPG-style fighting system made up of ridiculous Josh Williams attacks (Taking a Phone Call, Sending a 15-Page E-mail, Encouraging but Non-Committal Answer) and equally funny employee attacks (Resource Request, Vision Affirmation, and Technical Hurdle). We then matched up Josh's attack and the employee attack for a rock-paper-scissors combat resolution grid.


Plotting Together on Saturday Morning for Game in a Day

Download Josh Adventure here!


MazeFoller

Team Members: Matt Fairfax, Stephen Zepp, Brett Seyler, and Talana Fairfax

Game Description:We were after a multiplayer Tron clone with people instead of colored lines and evaporating trails with bombs and power-ups and all that goodness. Talana knocked out these spiffy animated characters and even the tiles you see in the maze.


MazeFoller in TGB


Comb-over Joe, Muscle Mike, and Sexy Lexy

Development Process and Challenges: We ran into a bit of trouble with the Tile Map editor (used to draw the mazes) and even more trying to get real-time networking figured out (not currently solved for TGB). We got close, but definitely a bigger hurdle than we'd imagined.


From Game Concepts (Top Left) to Art (Top Right) to Defining the Details (Bottom Left) to Coding (Bottom Right).
Unfortunately, although we got some neat stuff running in our game, we were unable to make a prototype, so we're not showcasing the game yet.

Final Thoughts

Game in a Day was good for us, not only because it was extremely fun, but because it made us more aware of what it's like to be a Torque developer. We found lots to like, lots we want to fix, tweak and tune, and had a great weekend. We'll keep plugging away at Torque technology on our end, and we hope you have as much fun as we did making games with Torque.