A Glimpse Behind the Scenes

A Glimpse Behind the Scenes

Last year at e3 - I read all the public statements of what Microsoft said about Xbox Live Arcade and other partner initiatives we'd been working with, under NDA, to see what I could talk about - this year promises to be no different.

Some of what I do at GarageGames you can see if you read between the lines of our recent announcements, but frequently the kinds of things Jeff T. or I are working on fall under some level of NDA. But to give you a glimpse into some of the excitement that goes on behind the scenes...

A little over a week ago, on the heals of having ATI engineers fly-in to GG headquarters to work with Brian, Ben, Josh and the team on next gen shader tech, Mark F., Dave Wyand and I made a trip down to Cupertino to Apple headquarters, one of GarageGames most valued partners.

Rich Hernandez the stellar, Apple Game segment manager, went above and beyond on to put together a very full day for us, when at the same moment Tiger ship was eminent, WWDC preparations were in full swing and the annual investors meeting was being held on campus (complete with protesters and news crews). We got the opportunity to meet with a number of different groups in part to inform them about what GG is doing on both the dev. tech and games side and in part to find ways to do more together. Torque 2D came up a few times in discussion.

In addition to talking with k-12 and higher education, retail, .mac, marketing and others, Dave and Mark got to sit down with Apple's use-ability guru, John Geleynse, and walk-through both Torque ShowTool Pro and the prototype of Torque Constructor (the interior editor we announced at GDC). It was clear that we could have spent a few days collaborating on some of the ways both Torque and our editors could be more Aqua'ish' as well as ideas around improved work flow. It was also good to see all the parts that Dave and our team have right and are becoming a solid foundation to build on.

An Adventure in Widgets
While we were there and the excitement around the Tiger launch was everywhere it came to our attention that if we'd ever had any Dashboard widget ideas that hadn't gotten done it would be a very opportune moment to finish them up and submit them. Dave had been thinking of putting his server status monitor into a widget.

So with a 12" Powerbook that Rich loaned us we 'kicked off the project'; first we started the download of a Tiger seed (over 5 hours on wi-fi in our hotel room), then got ahold of Alex Swanson back at GG for some non-programmer art layouts, then we went out to dinner at PF Chang's with Rich (who had to be home by 9 to lead a band of his WoW guild into some fearsome lost temple). At this point it became clear we had no DVD to burn (so we could get it installed on Dave's machine (that somehow lacked a battery) - so he could work in the airport before his flight on Friday. So we took a quick trip to Fry's (which closed at 9:30 - what are they thinking) and ended up at a Long's Drugs who of course have all the DVD-Rs you'd ever want (Dave assured me you can't go into just any drugstore in Toronto and buy from a selection of blank DVDs). This got us to the first step... now when our download completed we could burn on my laptop, that has the DVD burner, this many gig operating system and begin the odessey of making a widget.

My part at this point was pretty much complete (thats right get everyone excited and then let them do the heavy-lifting). I guess I did pass on a few emails, filled out the submission form and got it uploaded and made sure Rich at Apple knew when we had it done.

I'm sure Dave could give many more details on the good, the bad and the ugly of porting his Perl code over, but with a working code base already established, from the time we got inspired it was only one short week later it was done (maybe we should do a WIW - Widget In a Week - event). Now you can find the GG branded widget next to Yahoo's and ebay's on the Apple.com.

There are more announcements coming soon and e3 press releases to read, but the our motto keeps taking us to more exciting 'people we want to work with and projects we want to work on.'