The Beginning....(of what?)

For as long as I can remember, I've always been a hard core gamer. In the late 70's to early 80's, I couldn't get enough of the Radio Shack game console simply named the "TV Game" that consisted of two graphics settings (color or b/w) and two game choices....Tennis (which was an early pong clone) and Soccer (which was the pong clone again only played vertically instead of horizontally. Then, I'd rack up hours upon hours sitting 2 feet in front of my parent's 4 metric ton, 400 cubic meter Zenith console television with dials as big as my head, playing Megamania on my Atari 2600 until my thumb bled from mashing the little red button on the joystick, and my ears bled from my mom yelling at me to stop. Hell, even then I thought that "It couldn't get any better!". To be honest, I miss those days. Not sure why, but I do. I know some of you out there do too, but won't admit it. All I can say is, hold your head up high and be proud of where you come from. If it wasn't for us starting with 4 bit pong rip offs and wanting bigger and better, this industry would be dead.

Now let's skip ahead 25 or 30 years. Bigger and better are something that happens every few months it seems. Not that I'm complaining mind you. I'm and RPGMMO guy at heart, and I absolutely love getting that email saying that I've been chosen to participate in the beta test for "Joe Schmo's Super Galactic World of Warpedcraft's 3rd expansion pack".

However, I keep running into the same problem. I play and play and play, and mash and mash and mash, and grind and grind grind. I always feel like something is missing. And then finally, it was my wife who turned the light on by one simple comment. "Why don't you try?". Those 4 little words hit me like the center bar of my bike when the chain comes off. Could she be right? Of course she's right. She's the wife...lol.

Being a applications developer by trade (java and VB) and then making a move into web development for the past 6 years or so, the programming aspects didn't scare me as much as they might scare others that are wanting to develop games, but don't have any gfx, OOP or dev experience. I started doing research on schools and dev resources to see what my options were and if there was anything that I could just pick up on my own. Time and time again, Torque reared it's head as if to say "Yo dummy. I'm over here."

So, last night at about 9:30, I jumped in the car and headed to the nearest bookstore hoping that (A) they were still going to be open when I got there, and (B) they had a copy of 'The Game Programmer's Guide to TORQUE'. I lucked out on both accounts and managed to read about 160 pages last night. Though some of the terms and definitions seemed a little over my head at this point, the excitment more than made up for it. I did realize however, that I need to settle down just a tad and start at square one.

I asked myself....if not now, then when? (Is there ever an answer to that?) So I downloaded the Torque Game Builder. I'm familiarizing myself at the moment, and will try and make frequent updates here so that those with any type of remote interest can follow my progress. Think of me as your own Yamaguchi pet that you never have to feed. Can't beat it.

J