The Finish Line

Whee! I can finally talk about one of the things I have been working on during the last year. This week, Rack'em Up Road Trip shipped on MSN!


Rack'em up Road Trip reperesents the first commercial title that was developed in house at GarageGames (in partnership with Oberon Media) using Torque Game Builder, and demonstrates our commitment to 'eat our own dog food'. With every peice of technology we make, we feel compelled to put it through its paces and give it a real world run through the guantlet.

We started Rack 'em up Road Trip last year with a pre-release version of Torque Game Builder. Starting in early on the engine development process, we worked hard by tackling what is actually a pretty difficult project.

First, we had to match the feel and rules of a game that people have real world experience with. We could not ignore interface issues that were not working or change the rules if things were confusing. We had to work toward solutions. There were a myriad of small interface issues with foul reporting, communicating the players which balls were 'legal' (particularly with snooker), and challenges with the AI in getting them to be fun enough to play against. Additionally, we upped the ante by adding some sort of movement 'bling' to every GUI screen. Very little of the in game navigation is done on static screens. We made a pretty big game, and we still kept the download very reasonable (in the 10MB range) and kept memory usage low.

We faced many difficulties and challenges, and in the process, TGB became a much stronger engine because of it. What did not work, we had to fix, where the workflow was not usable, we created tools to help speed the process along. We suffered through this pain so you guys did not have to.

We knew going in that this would be a hard road, and we also believed that the engine, even at that early state, was up to the challenge we were taking on. TGB measured up, and did not let us down.

I want to send out a massive thanks to the team, Robert Blanchett, who took the lead on programming and was with this project from beginning to end, Mark McCoy, without whose help the game would not look half as good as it does, Zach Zadell, without who we would have no single player game, Justin DuJardin, who was instrumental in giving us our whoosy, blingee GUIs. A shout goes out to Adam, Clark, Pat, Jeff, Josh, Melv, Paul, Eric Elwell, and everyone else who contributed to getting this game accross the finish line.

Check it out!