Plan for Mike Stoddart
by Mike Stoddart · 08/21/2002 (2:41 pm) · 2 comments
Front Room Games Is No More
It was slowly becoming clear to me that the name Front Room Games was no longer satisfactory. When I chose the name, I didn't realise how close the name was to GarageGames until it was too late. I mean, how stupid was I?!
Also, I recently added my work on Front Room Games' project "War In Europe" to my resume, as I'm currently looking for work. Though I'm proud of the new information on my resume, the company name doesn't seem to work with the resume image as a whole.
So, after some deliberation and some help from my brother, Front Room Games is now known as (fanfare and trumpets!:
Pixellent Interactive
We have a new website, which is very much a work in progress and it can be found at:
pixellent.stodge.net
I'm badly in need of someone to create a new theme for the site, but I'm almost 100% sure that I'll be using the scripts that are in place there now.
War In Europe
The re-branding doesn't stop there!
When I originally decided to pursue the War In Europe project, I didn't realise that there was a Half-Life mod kicking around with the same name. When it was brought to my attention, I visited the site and from memory I thought that the site and the project were both dead.
Unfortunately for me, the project is very much alive, so I'm in the process of re-naming War In Europe as well.
I just spent several hours of my day debating with a bunch of idiots on a forum elsewhere as to whether I stole the name WIE or not. Well I will publicly state that I didn't and I couldn't. How could I steal something that I didn't know existed? How some people can fail to understand that logic just escapes me, but when you're dealing with a bunch of pre-pubescant Beavis & Butthead wannabees I'm afraid you'll never indulge in a decent debate.
Other news
I can't remember if I posted this in an earlier plan, but we've decided on the first battle that we will implement as a mission. I'll release more details when I know specifically which part of the battle we will do. But it feels good knowing that we have a starting point. This will help us research units, weapons and architecture.
I've had quite a lot of interest recently from people who wanted to join as a researcher, designer and also as a scripter. I know I personally need some researchers on the project to dig up battles, skirmishes, weapons, units and locations as I don't have time to collate this info myself.
We're still looking for a 3d player animator
Recent Work
Kenny is currently researching the first mission. Luckily he lives in the next town to where the battle took place, and I think he's quite excited about this as it gives him the chance to visit the local museum a few more times!
I've seen some of John's ideas for a splash screen, and I was very impressed. It's still at the hand drawn stage, but the attention to detail was superb.
I'm still fleshing out the design document. We keep trying to increase the feature list, so I'm trying not to lose control of what we can realistically implement. I've spent a lot of time working on the usual PM stuff, like planning, schedule, more recruitment and playing with the prototype. I've moved all game data under fps/data, and removed the need to load scripts for players and weapons under fps/server/scripts. I haven't seen any side effects, so hopefully we've finally managed to achieve the modular effect that I've been hoping for.
Dawdler is currently experimenting with a level created solely in Worldcraft with no terrain block. Initial results are impressive in terms of detail and performance, so I'm really excited to see how far he can push the engine in this respect. We don't necessarily need a terrain block for all of our missions, purely because we're working at the squad level.
Dawdler's is also finishing off the command menu, although there are still some additions that will need to be made in the future. He's experimenting with creating realistic weapons, and I think he hit upon the same state machine problem that I did. I think that when you modify the timing of the state machine, you can often get strange results as something is out of synch. Hopefully he'll resolve that soon.
Anyway, sorry to waffle on but I think that if you read back through this plan, we haven't made that much progress in terms of completed code! Thanks for reading!
It was slowly becoming clear to me that the name Front Room Games was no longer satisfactory. When I chose the name, I didn't realise how close the name was to GarageGames until it was too late. I mean, how stupid was I?!
Also, I recently added my work on Front Room Games' project "War In Europe" to my resume, as I'm currently looking for work. Though I'm proud of the new information on my resume, the company name doesn't seem to work with the resume image as a whole.
So, after some deliberation and some help from my brother, Front Room Games is now known as (fanfare and trumpets!:
Pixellent Interactive
We have a new website, which is very much a work in progress and it can be found at:
pixellent.stodge.net
I'm badly in need of someone to create a new theme for the site, but I'm almost 100% sure that I'll be using the scripts that are in place there now.
War In Europe
The re-branding doesn't stop there!
When I originally decided to pursue the War In Europe project, I didn't realise that there was a Half-Life mod kicking around with the same name. When it was brought to my attention, I visited the site and from memory I thought that the site and the project were both dead.
Unfortunately for me, the project is very much alive, so I'm in the process of re-naming War In Europe as well.
I just spent several hours of my day debating with a bunch of idiots on a forum elsewhere as to whether I stole the name WIE or not. Well I will publicly state that I didn't and I couldn't. How could I steal something that I didn't know existed? How some people can fail to understand that logic just escapes me, but when you're dealing with a bunch of pre-pubescant Beavis & Butthead wannabees I'm afraid you'll never indulge in a decent debate.
Other news
I can't remember if I posted this in an earlier plan, but we've decided on the first battle that we will implement as a mission. I'll release more details when I know specifically which part of the battle we will do. But it feels good knowing that we have a starting point. This will help us research units, weapons and architecture.
I've had quite a lot of interest recently from people who wanted to join as a researcher, designer and also as a scripter. I know I personally need some researchers on the project to dig up battles, skirmishes, weapons, units and locations as I don't have time to collate this info myself.
We're still looking for a 3d player animator
Recent Work
Kenny is currently researching the first mission. Luckily he lives in the next town to where the battle took place, and I think he's quite excited about this as it gives him the chance to visit the local museum a few more times!
I've seen some of John's ideas for a splash screen, and I was very impressed. It's still at the hand drawn stage, but the attention to detail was superb.
I'm still fleshing out the design document. We keep trying to increase the feature list, so I'm trying not to lose control of what we can realistically implement. I've spent a lot of time working on the usual PM stuff, like planning, schedule, more recruitment and playing with the prototype. I've moved all game data under fps/data, and removed the need to load scripts for players and weapons under fps/server/scripts. I haven't seen any side effects, so hopefully we've finally managed to achieve the modular effect that I've been hoping for.
Dawdler is currently experimenting with a level created solely in Worldcraft with no terrain block. Initial results are impressive in terms of detail and performance, so I'm really excited to see how far he can push the engine in this respect. We don't necessarily need a terrain block for all of our missions, purely because we're working at the squad level.
Dawdler's is also finishing off the command menu, although there are still some additions that will need to be made in the future. He's experimenting with creating realistic weapons, and I think he hit upon the same state machine problem that I did. I think that when you modify the timing of the state machine, you can often get strange results as something is out of synch. Hopefully he'll resolve that soon.
Anyway, sorry to waffle on but I think that if you read back through this plan, we haven't made that much progress in terms of completed code! Thanks for reading!
About the author
#2
08/22/2002 (9:19 am)
Thanks Sabre. Yeah I remember not putting too much effort in the naming of both the game and the company at the time, which was probably a mistake!
Torque Owner Sabrecyd
Too bad about the naming issues. We have a similar problem with our long term project - Savage Realms - Yeah, too close to Realm Wars and now there's a game called Savage coming out. We've had it as a working title for about two years (mostly design ideas and storyline anyway) but have basically started over when we got Torque. The name was really meant to be replaced when we came up with a better one anyway.
Good luck,
-Sabrecyd