Left brain vs. right brain vs. Torque (or a good excuse to plug our Tweaker)

Code meets art and what we did about it. I.E. the Plastic Tweaker.

We've all had those days when you put down your work for the day and felt absolutely, dragged-through-the-ringer, kicked around, beat up tired. I've had those days and almost felt guilty, thinking that I really hadn't done anything to warrant feeling so wiped out.

In between semesters when I was going to art school I would work some menial labor jobs. A few were really brutal with a lot of lifting and walking around on your feet for 9 to 10 hours a day. By the time I got off work I'd be exhausted and barely able to move but I swear that I've been more exhausted after working in Torque and Photoshop and other 3d applications all day than when I worked those jobs.

One of my cohorts at Plastic Games experiences the same thing. The theory we came up with is that while we're not doing anything physically exhausting, we're doing a lot of work mentally and psychologically by constantly shifting from right to left brain, from the logical and analytical side or left side to the intuitive and creative right side. In essence, one has to become two different people and shift from one to another depending on the task all day long.

Many of us, out of necessity, have to wear many hats. We have to think in an artistic way yet maintain the ability create from a technical standpoint as well. While we can envision the fantastic we have to ask ourselves whether it's actually doable and then try to figure out how to do it.

For me, this mental wear and tear happens when I'm going back and forth between art-heavy work in Torque and creation with my art software and tools outside of the engine with GUI work being the most taxing of the processes.

Most of us have worked in Torque enough to know that, for the most part, it's a beast to manage when you're in a very intensive art creation phase of development. Getting things to just look and feel "right" is a huge part of what an artist must be doing.

Much of the time we have no idea why something should look, feel or react, we just know it's right when it feels right. We'll be given the challenge to just make it "right". And there is no way to describe or pass on any information to help someone else make it "right".

I'm sure you can't count the number of times you have to interrupt your creative mind process to close the engine make necessary tweaks and then restart the engine to see if the tweaks did what you wanted them to only to have to start the process over again when it wasn't "right".

If you're like us you're constantly in a phase that requires that your art team be heavily involved in the tweaking of scripts, particles, animations, etc. These can be small changes here and there to major ones that have an effect on everything in the game.

In our past project we were working with the walking speed of the player, the weapon effects, speed of projectiles, etc. We were pulling our coders away from what they were doing to get them involved in what we were doing because some of our tweaks required more knowledge of code than we could feasibly attain. (We're only artists, right?) It was almost impossible to explain what we wanted or felt. We just wanted to be able to make it so.

Work flow was breaking down and we were tired of this process, our coders were sick of us bugging them and we were tired of asking them to help us and then Paul said, "Enough!" and started working on our Plastic Tweaker.

Even in it's embryonic stages we saw the beauty of this tool. We were given the ability to make changes on the fly and immediately see the effects without closing down the game to make a script change and essentially, close down the creative half of our brain in the process. It suddenly gave us power to make things "right."

We were able to stop asking for help from our coders for script changes that were originally beyond our knowledge. The more we added to it, the better it served us on so many levels, from it's ability to the alter the player and weapons properties to the tool's ability to edit shaders and materials -- which should excite artists exponentially. It's expandable too, so the more you add to it the more powerful it is. It even lets you work with GUIs.

After using it for the last month or so, I'm convinced that we couldn't live without it. Once it's installed and you are comfortable with it's interface -- which we put a lot of work into to make it feel familiar -- you'll see how powerful it is. It has very little learning curve and anyone even remotely comfortable with Torque script can see the how it's working.

Originally it was a tool that was created to give artists more power over Torque but in no way is it limited to artists. It's flexible enough to be used by anyone from the novice to the pro and will speed up your work flow and alleviate your mental strain almost immediately.

Try it. We're pretty sure you'll like it.

For more information, check it out here.