Distressed Robot Labour: Part One

Self Intro

Over the past few months after purchasing Torque3D I've made a [very] small presence for myself on the forums and have been passively browsing them for hours every day to obtain all the knowledge I can from the many patrons of the Garage Games community who devote so much time and effort to helping others and sharing what they can. Until now what I sought this knowledge for has been mostly a mystery as barring a couple screenshots of my game in a thread here and there I haven't really talked about it at all but given how welcoming and reliable the community is I knew I would eventually need to somehow start giving back what little I can and try and inspire or assist others in return.

And so I would like to start by announcing my current work in progress...



Distressed Robot Labour is the brain child of myself and my peer Sam Read. We are both first year students, moving to second year in September, on Huddersfield universities computer game design course. My own area of expertise is 3D which I have been self teaching myself for quite some years now and Sam is a game designer and jack of all trades (and a heart of gold).

The motivation behind our game idea was that we wanted to stand out from the rest of our peers and make the most of our education and of course because we love video games and want to create games that others will enjoy and hopefully love too.

The gameplay itself without revealing too much is Platforming in the same vein as Super Mario Sunshine mixed in with the timed obstacle course type level system of Super Monkey Ball and Marble Blast Ultra.
Now onto actually making our game...

The Core Design

Once we had reached the conclusion that we wanted to make a game we were suddenly struck with so many possibilities that it was actually daunting to rule them all out and choose one. The only constants we had in mind at the start was the game will be 3D (this decision helped to play up to my own strengths and set us out from our year group who were currently designing 2D games), we should both enjoy the game we are making to stay passionate about its production and it should also be feasible that we ever complete it. The last point meant some genres instantly became off limits such as MMO's, as others have pointed out on this very site creating all the assets required and generating a community big enough to sustain an MMO are very tricky jobs for small indie teams, and choosing a genre we both love and would love to design for ruled out more genres but we still needed an idea. Eventually we landed on the thought of old school platform games and decided that was the safest and most fun bet to take.

The following weeks were spent planning. We did A LOT of planning. We needed to design as much as we could before we chose a game engine and we still had to refine our idea. We planned possible game mechanics, colour schemes, character designs, narratives, control schemes everything we possibly could manage without actually getting our hands on an engine and then...we chose an engine.

Choosing Our Game Engine

After those frenzied weeks of planning we got to quite a tough part of our so far short lived game design venture. Choosing an engine would directly affect our workload, the finished game, how much money we had to spend (being students I can't say we exactly had a lot to throw around to trial and error) and also, quite importantly, how likely it would be that we would have to find a permanent programmer. Programmers are scarce for a first year; none of the more advanced programmers will risk taking a chance on a first year so we had to prove as much as we could by ourselves with our own limited knowledge of the area.

There was a high incentive to use UDK since we are taught it in our second year and our university purchases licenses for it by the truck full but we were worried it would lead us to that need for a dedicated programmer that we simply couldn't acquire at the time. We also had to think about how hard it is to make a full 3D game since it was no easy task and we knew it. So we continued to search around and eventually we came to Torque and it's safe to say it was probably....love at first sight.



At the time we found it Garage Games was just getting back into action and also the new low price was very appealing but the final arrow to the heart was the Action Adventure Kit by Ubiq Visuals.



Looking at the functionality included in that kit we knew we would be able to tweak it and work with it to get something close to what we wanted and so we (rightfully) made our purchase.

What's Happened Since Then

I'm sure everyone who is reading this knows how slow making a game can be. And to be learning the engine and who knows how many other things at the same time can sometimes make things go at a snails pace. But that's alright because making games is a lot of fun!

Regarding the games progress we decided to limit our current alpha phase to just two of the "worlds" in the game for testing gameplay mechanics as we manage to add them and also to get some of the art assets built. Below are some screenshots of grass world and lava world.

(Our AA is currently broken because of the engine upgrade to 1.1final and the AAK not being updated but Ubiq Visuals will be releasing an updated version pretty soon so until then please mind the jagged edges.)



And right now we are getting closer and closer to finishing up some of the core mechanics we need to get in the game before continuing.

Air Vents, Speed Ramps, 2D sections and Conveyor belts are shown here respectively.



What Next?

The next challenges our game faces are probably the biggest and boarding on that point where we wish we had a programmer. We need to add some interactive environment to the game to reach that level of quality we want. Initially we hoped to do this via moving platforms and the path shape resource but we have both put a lot of effort in and embarrassingly haven' managed to even get it working on a fresh install yet let alone merging it with our current project and the changes the action adventure kit makes. I fear it may be above and beyond our current level of skill. Alternatives to the interactive environment I've considered are kill triggers that move/turn on and off every couple seconds or so to add something like fire that shoots out at timed intervals but this again is a very big challenge for us.

Overall there's still a long way for our game to go but reminiscing about how it all started and looking at what we currently have I can honestly say I'm optimistic for the future :)

I'd like to thank the people at Garage Games and members of the community who have assisted me thus far (with a special thanks to Ubiq Visuals for the AAK and also Steve from Yorkshire rifles for assisting me on the forums often and making me feel less awkward about posting there) and I hope I managed to write something worthwhile to read.

Thanks for reading and feel free to ask questions or criticise (constructively hopefully :P),

Lewis