Plan for FenrirWolf

Seems I missed the initial release of Torque 2D on Friday. I didn't notice it was out until Monday. When I saw it, I knew I had to pick it up. I knew this even back when Melv was talking about a keeno 2D scenegraph he was adding to TGE in the forums... :)

Here are some screenies of my first (official) T2D project:

Cloudburst 1
Cloudburst 2
Cloudburst 3
Cloudburst 4
Cloudburst 5
Cloudburst 6
Cloudburst 7
Cloudburst 8
Cloudburst 9
Cloudburst 10
Cloudburst 11
Cloudburst 12

The robot boss's arms and legs are completely seperate from its body, and can be shot off. (For the amusement of the player -- You only need to take out his rocket jet backpack in order to kill him.) When you destroy his backpack, he goes through a little death animation that was influenced by the spider-robot death scene from Einhander. ;)

Here are some vidoes of it in action:

Cloudburst Preview (low quality MPG, 4.8M)

Cloudburst Preview (high quality MPG, 10.2M)

(Note, some people have reported the videos aren't playing properly in WMP. I'm not sure why, it's just an MPEG-1 stream, encoded using TMPGEnc. You can use VLC player or Quicktime if you have problems.)

Cloudburst is just a single level game that I don't plan on extending. It's both a demo of my own abilities, and a test for myself. Can I make a modern looking 2D game that has slick graphics with this new 2D game engine by GG? How quickly can I get a project like this up to speed, and how well does it work?

Judging from the response on here, and elsewhere, it looks like I passed the test. I am totally and utterly sold on T2D. :) Cloudburst has taken me about a week to get working. One of those days was spent chasing a slowdown issue that had a simple solution once I understood some currently-undocumented part of T2D and another was spent making that robot rat!

T2D has not only met my (fairly demanding) expectations, but it has exceeded them as well! T2D is the sort of 2D-over-3D-hardware engine I've been thinking about implementing myself. I'm glad Melv and Josh came along and did all the hard stuff for me. That's worth a bit of my cash. ;)

One thing about T2D -- I would say it's harder to get used to if you've already been doing 2D game programming using your own engines/libraries and haven't been accustomed to making games under 3D limitations. No, you can't just have a sprite of unlimited size or dimensions, and no you can't have a bazillion frames of animation, each frame its own independant size. However, with 3D hardware you get rotation, scaling and blending for just about absolutely free, so the benefits outweight the slight loss of freedom.

Also gone are the days of absolute, per-frame control over your sprites. T2D handles that for you. You just give it data to feed into its physics system and let it take it from there. Sure, you can write scripts that sets sprite positions absolutely, but a lot of the time it's easier to refactor your idea so it can be done with T2D's physics system. But, like above, you get a lot of stuff for free by using that system -- damping, rebound, friction and restitution.

So what have I been working on? Well, mostly HalfLight: Adagio. It's a very retro-styled shooter that features a pretty detailed story. I've recently ported it over to OSX and was glad to see it mentioned on a few well known Mac sites. It got so many downloads, it absolutely crushed my poor DSL-hosted website! ;)

Now that T2D is here, though, I've scrapped a few of my plans on making my next game using my own engine and will be using T2D.

"But David, what about Spacerace/Raven's Run/GRM?" Indefinitely on hold for now. I gave my hand at doing 3D with Torque. But I've found that making even a fairly simple 3D game is a lot of work for just one person. Plus, I've noticed that my abilities as an artist are better tuned for 2D work. I can do 3D, but it takes a certain mindset for doing low-poly work. Sure, SpaceRace only took me a week to make but it's a really simple game, filled with a lot of problems and graphically isn't that appealing. Worse, the modeler I love to use (Lightwave) isn't directly supported by GG and there's been some roadbumps on getting my creations into TGE. Anyway, I'm not that much of a coding whiz to be able to understand most of the intricacies of TGE/TSE or to fix any roadbumps I might encounter in the art path. :)

Besides, a lot of the games I like to play are still 2D. I've given thought to 3D-izing some of my ideas, but I've spent enough time with Torque to know this is a fairly monumental task. That third dimension really does add a lot of complexity, and I don't just mean in code/logic.

Some might say that's a pretty limited view of game making, or even a cop-out, but honestly I think it doesn't matter if your game is 2D, 3D, or ASCII graphics on a Commodore PET -- as long as it entertains and engrossed the player, it has accomplished its task. I don't necessarily mind making games that many might view as unnecessarily niche-market; If I wanted to make popular, big-industry style games, I'd be working on "Doom 4: The MMORTSFPSOMGWTFBBQ."

Let me tell you a story: A long time ago, I made a game in QuickBASIC for DOS on my old Commodore Colt computer. (Yes, they once made PCs. Shush, I'm telling a story.) I uploaded it to local BBSes and it had a moderately positive reaction among my friends. But I never really did that much with spreading the game. Once, when I was back on AOL (hey, it was the only decent-sized online service available in Meridian, Mississippi until around the mid-90s!), I uploaded it to their games section and completely forgot about it.

Six months or so later, I got a letter in the mail. It was from a lady who wanted to register the game (her check was enclosed) and who told me that the game's universe had impressed her. To the point that she even included a sketch she had drawn of the main character, Quiwkali.

My eyes nearly welled up reading that letter. I just hadn't made a video game, I had had told a story that touched someone far away. To me, that is what making games is about. It's not about polygons, or sprites, or sound effects -- It's about creating something that both entertains and surrounds you in a world of its own, where you can let yourself go and live in an alternate universe, dodging laser blasts as you rush to save the world. Even my stupid little 2D shooters have rich, detailed milieu with what I hope are engrossing stories and vivid characters.

I guess the point I am trying to make is that I am a storyteller who uses video games as his medium. And I'm thankful that GG has given me another tool I can use to bring my worlds alive.

Uh, heh. I didn't mean for this .plan to turn so maudlin. Now, back to game making! And you, Melv! Add 3D rotating isometric hexmap sprites to T2D! I demand it! *whip crack*