Plan for Toby W. Allen
by Toby W. Allen · 04/06/2005 (2:57 pm) · 2 comments
Well I've finally taken the time to get this started - I thought I would put down some of my first thoughts and more here...
I'll start with small intros into what I'm up to and more (If you want more specifics on me, check my profile)...
Game Development Society
The Game Development Society (GDS Leeds) of the University of Leeds, England, was setup by Sam Higgs, Mike Hollaway and myself. The society was created to fill in a gap in our studies as the University does not provide a Game-related course, thus we step in and give the members and interested people a forum for discussion. We involve the members through LAN parties, talks, trips, etc.
The main focus is also to learn about game development and thus we created our first project (More on that below). We've been very fortunate to have met the Rockstar Leeds team, Team 17, and Game Republic. we've had the pleasure of Ernest Adams and we'll have talks with other people pretty soon. For the first year, this society has been pretty unique in the UK and is strongly supported by Microsoft's Academic team and the great guys at GameRepublic.
Current Project: Ninjasticks
We started this project with pretty simple idea, which now has turned into a slightly larger game than previously anticipated. Nonetheless this is good, and keeping us busy. The game is a stickfigure 3D beat'em up game - oh did I forget to mention this is completely cel-sahded, just to give it a nice 2D look. We've kept a very open book approach to the game, so that we can show all of the aspects of game development to our members and public, this helps us show our progress and capabilities.
The project is coming along very nicely, we've been very lucky to use Torque to power the game. It's got a fair bit to go until we've got something really fun, for the moment a large part of the core components are still being brought into the game. Until the motion capturing is done and this character export sorted (More on that below) we might then consider a beta release and some screenshots. The members have hugely contributed to the concept work and pre-production of the game, while the main decisions has remained in the hands of the committee which has learnt a lot through the weekly meetings we have to discuss the game and the society.
We're pretty new to Torque, so if you have any really good tips, please chuck'em our way.
Torque
Well having had experience with other indie engines, I am pleased to say that for prototyping this engine is really really great! A large part of the future for Torque seems even better so I'm very pleased. I'm happy to have chosen this engine for the society, and I think the rest of the committee would agree with that too. You can do a fair amount of cool stuff with Torque and it's a very good introduction into the more complex engines. The GDC '05 stuff really rocks and the community here is seriously rock solid.
We've faced some serious issues with Torque however; the documentation needs not only to be improved into covering more and answering more questions, but also to be clearer in general, with a quick recap section. I know plans for the site are in the works, so this is good news. Areas such as exporting characters (the hard bit of exporting) is one of the examples where the documentation fails, the amount of problems I've had with this is just mad - part of it my fault, but parts not (Check the thread - www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=28234). A large amount comes from unclear documentation, which is additionally linked with with what I find to be a very clutered forum and search engine (Could we try google-powered searches?). Getting some of the less-experienced members of the society facing these types of problems would be a nightmare. Any help (and we need some!) is more than welcome!
That said, it is a very powerful engine, I definately welcome the Shader Engine, as the society is trying to implement Cel-Shading, we've been wondering about TSE and it's capabilities. We'll wait and see for the moment until it comes with more power under the hood (i.e: does Cel-Shading and more). A lot of resources need to be cleared up and/or marked that these have been included into the engine.
This said, again I'm very happy with Torque, its a really nice 'plug 'n play' engine, which is a methodology which I believe should always be kept with engine development. While the initial hurdles of the engine's SDK and examples are a fair learning curve, not only because you're figuring out how the engine works, but because you are trying to understand why this has been done in such a way (specially for scripting) - Although it seems a little odd, not to include any introduction readme or note when the SDK is there, simply to explain what's where (The current 'Readme' doesn't cover this).
--
The future of Torque and our project seems very promising and that's something that's very pleasing! More details on some specific things (Gauraud and Stencil Shadows) could be released by GG's team, which I think would help, but at the same time the R&D into this is a good learning
process.
Anyways, I've spend the day in max... my brain feels quite fried, so I thought about this little jobby I could do. Feel free to check out our website www.gdsleeds.com.
Voila, Merci!
Toby W. Allen
President
GDS leeds
www.gdsleeds.com
I'll start with small intros into what I'm up to and more (If you want more specifics on me, check my profile)...
Game Development Society
The Game Development Society (GDS Leeds) of the University of Leeds, England, was setup by Sam Higgs, Mike Hollaway and myself. The society was created to fill in a gap in our studies as the University does not provide a Game-related course, thus we step in and give the members and interested people a forum for discussion. We involve the members through LAN parties, talks, trips, etc.
The main focus is also to learn about game development and thus we created our first project (More on that below). We've been very fortunate to have met the Rockstar Leeds team, Team 17, and Game Republic. we've had the pleasure of Ernest Adams and we'll have talks with other people pretty soon. For the first year, this society has been pretty unique in the UK and is strongly supported by Microsoft's Academic team and the great guys at GameRepublic.
Current Project: Ninjasticks
We started this project with pretty simple idea, which now has turned into a slightly larger game than previously anticipated. Nonetheless this is good, and keeping us busy. The game is a stickfigure 3D beat'em up game - oh did I forget to mention this is completely cel-sahded, just to give it a nice 2D look. We've kept a very open book approach to the game, so that we can show all of the aspects of game development to our members and public, this helps us show our progress and capabilities.
The project is coming along very nicely, we've been very lucky to use Torque to power the game. It's got a fair bit to go until we've got something really fun, for the moment a large part of the core components are still being brought into the game. Until the motion capturing is done and this character export sorted (More on that below) we might then consider a beta release and some screenshots. The members have hugely contributed to the concept work and pre-production of the game, while the main decisions has remained in the hands of the committee which has learnt a lot through the weekly meetings we have to discuss the game and the society.
We're pretty new to Torque, so if you have any really good tips, please chuck'em our way.
Torque
Well having had experience with other indie engines, I am pleased to say that for prototyping this engine is really really great! A large part of the future for Torque seems even better so I'm very pleased. I'm happy to have chosen this engine for the society, and I think the rest of the committee would agree with that too. You can do a fair amount of cool stuff with Torque and it's a very good introduction into the more complex engines. The GDC '05 stuff really rocks and the community here is seriously rock solid.
We've faced some serious issues with Torque however; the documentation needs not only to be improved into covering more and answering more questions, but also to be clearer in general, with a quick recap section. I know plans for the site are in the works, so this is good news. Areas such as exporting characters (the hard bit of exporting) is one of the examples where the documentation fails, the amount of problems I've had with this is just mad - part of it my fault, but parts not (Check the thread - www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=28234). A large amount comes from unclear documentation, which is additionally linked with with what I find to be a very clutered forum and search engine (Could we try google-powered searches?). Getting some of the less-experienced members of the society facing these types of problems would be a nightmare. Any help (and we need some!) is more than welcome!
That said, it is a very powerful engine, I definately welcome the Shader Engine, as the society is trying to implement Cel-Shading, we've been wondering about TSE and it's capabilities. We'll wait and see for the moment until it comes with more power under the hood (i.e: does Cel-Shading and more). A lot of resources need to be cleared up and/or marked that these have been included into the engine.
This said, again I'm very happy with Torque, its a really nice 'plug 'n play' engine, which is a methodology which I believe should always be kept with engine development. While the initial hurdles of the engine's SDK and examples are a fair learning curve, not only because you're figuring out how the engine works, but because you are trying to understand why this has been done in such a way (specially for scripting) - Although it seems a little odd, not to include any introduction readme or note when the SDK is there, simply to explain what's where (The current 'Readme' doesn't cover this).
--
The future of Torque and our project seems very promising and that's something that's very pleasing! More details on some specific things (Gauraud and Stencil Shadows) could be released by GG's team, which I think would help, but at the same time the R&D into this is a good learning
process.
Anyways, I've spend the day in max... my brain feels quite fried, so I thought about this little jobby I could do. Feel free to check out our website www.gdsleeds.com.
Voila, Merci!
Toby W. Allen
President
GDS leeds
www.gdsleeds.com
About the author
#2
I should be at the next GR meeting in leeds, so if you have any hard questions about how to do something in torque, feel free to corner me.
Nice to see you guys actually getting on with a game rather than worrying about all sorts of irrelevant things (students have a habit of doing that :))
04/07/2005 (3:19 am)
Nice one Toby, I should be at the next GR meeting in leeds, so if you have any hard questions about how to do something in torque, feel free to corner me.
Nice to see you guys actually getting on with a game rather than worrying about all sorts of irrelevant things (students have a habit of doing that :))
Torque Owner Ian Roach
Great stuff i had a similar idea, with fancy matrix like moves.
Look forward to checking out your progress.