Plan for Ed Averill

Ok, I give up.. kind of. ;-)

Indeedy do, as far as I've been able to personally determine even with Torque it's impossible for one man to do a decent job on an indie game nowadays and still have time for minor inconvienences like work, health, shopping, that kind of thing! Even just trying to stick with scripting, not hacking the engine itself, there's still too much to be done in the way of generating content for the bloody thing. And good artists (or even just passable ones) are impossible to find around here, at least that have time and are willing to do work for just beer-and-pizza level money.

So what's a poor boy to do? Well, I think I have enough bandwidth to work on tools - specifically, developing an Eclipse environment that is specific for Torque development. I'm learning to write Eclipse plugins at the day gig, and I figure I might as well do something useful with that experience. Since Microsoft has released free versions of their compiler, SDK, and .NET stuff it seems like those without Tons Of Cash(tm) would be able to make use of such a thing.. especially if I can get tools (Quark, etc.) into the integrated environment.. producing kind of a "Torque IDE" affair. Heck, once it's done, I might even be able to develop a microgame on my own (lol, hope springs infernal and all that rot).

It's going to be a long process, I'm sure, as the Eclipse environment is no joke to code for, plus I'm learning Java (I'm a C/C++/assembly hack at heart) so there's some ramp-up time here. I'll post an updated .plan when I get a Web page up on my domain for the project, in case anyone is interested in watching my (so-called) progress. I have no idea if anyone will really care and/or use this once it comes out, but who knows? At least it will be fun and educational making it!