The Adventures of TomFeni

My adventures with Toby Turtle :)

I have been working on a game idea for over a year now and learning all the way thru. I have to say I have a much better understanding of the whole game development from gui's to level design.

I started with a free player model that had no dsq's and basically was a animated turtle. I took it and compiled all the dsq's I thought I would need and then proceeded to add him to the starter.fps. He turned out to be as bigger then Kork! hehehe so I went in and resized him. which in turn caused issues on re-importing him back into torque. arms floating in weird spots and legs twisting up.

I then figured out how to resize him and import when I found out he was backwards.. Argghhh! what the heck. So I went back to milkshape and figured out how to turn him around and fix all the animations. So now I had a turtle that could walk.. Yay!

So I ran around for a while and then ran into the water, ughh what no swimming? so I went over to the forums and got the crouch prone swim animation code and compiled that in.. cool.. but the swim animation was wrong.. hmm.. So I went into the model again and I saw the swim animation.. added it and away I went, swimming all over..

Then I noticed when he was just sitting in one spot he was still swimming full bore.. Back to the drawing board.. slowed the swim animation down and made it more of a treading water animation..

so I made some test levels and added the coins from my old toons game. Then it hit me.. Turtle needs to pick up eggs not coins.. So I made a basic egg shape and gave it a green shell, and then decided to do a yellow one so I could have seperate eggs with different values..

I used the guis from the gpgt book for the scores and lives. which I didnt have code for. That was for later..

So now I had a player and an idea but not much else.. I had a hand full of textures that I took from the starter.fps and compiled it into a wad..
But it was what i was looking for.. So I pulled up my PSP 6.0 and started making my own by messing with the settings..
I made some box textures and made some levels out of box shapes. looked OK but wasnt what i was looking for. So I made some indoor maps with the same textures.. Still not right.. so I started from scratch again and designed levels using all the textures I had.. Looked ok but the textures I made looked off, so i pulled those and was back to the ones I got from the starter example.

So I started with creating 7 levels with different themes, I had the island main map. which had entrances to the castle, tunnel, and the mystery forest. I spent several months working on those and getting them looking fairly decent. Then I stopped and decided to work on the code side..

To be continued......