Plan for Clark Fagot

I'm once again going against Joe's advice and posting a plan with no pretty pictures.

This plan is actually just going to be a re-hash of my comments in this thread regarding the benefits to all (including the community) of the BraveTree and GarageGames merger (note how pride makes me call it a merger not an acquisition).

We've all been excited about this move for a while. It's been a definite positive for our productivity. I no longer have to talk to accountants, lawyers, and insurance agents (although they are all perfectly nice people, just in case any of them are reading this :). Joe no longer has to get on the phone to do biz dev. In fact, I work from home several days a week now (I sit on my couch at 10:30am as I type), simply because I can and I like the change of environment.

But the benefits go well beyond that. To answer some of the questions that Brian Russey (rightly) raises in the thread I linked to above, allow me to focus on how this change affects the work I do.

Any little project I decide to pick up and work on for a week can now be a productive task rather than blue sky work where the payout is uncertain. E.g., at the beginning of the year I spent some evenings allowing Torque to do scalable shells (which means that the screen pretends it's, say, 800x600 even when it's bigger or smaller). Anyone who has worked on creating a multi-res shell knows what a nice feature this is (previously only available in the Unreal engine). It's the type of project that doesn't really work as a resource because there are so many teeny (but important) changes to make. But it can easily be added to a future version of Torque and suddenly everyone has access to it just like that. Before, although I could contribute the code back to Torque (and in the past I had done that with a number of enhancements and bug fixes) it didn't really behoove me to make a practice of doing new things and then contributing them to Torque simply because we needed to make sure our time was spent on tasks that brought in money in a timely fasion -- all the other indies out there know where I'm coming from on this one I'm sure.

Another example is the work I'm doing on network physics and collisions for dRacer. I've spent a good amount of time studying why when vehicles get near each other you get what JoshW calls the Torque jitter. The reason comes down to all the objects on the clients and the server having their own idea of "what time is it?". The result of all this study has been a system which I think will help propel Torque even further ahead of the competition when it comes to networking. So far I only have proof of concept working, but it's looking like this will solve a big problem with mutliplayer racing games and other games which want to have a lot of networked contact between the game objects. As BraveTree we would have a hard time monetizing this work. It would go into our games, but clearly it's value goes well beyond usage in our own games. We could have simply contributed it back to GarageGames, but as an indie you don't want to be giving away cutting edge work you do just because you don't know how to fully realize it's value. As GarageGames, the value of this project can be easily realized by simply adding the code to HEAD.

Then there's the component system, which I can now keep a more watchful eye on to make sure it conforms to my vision of what it can be. We had a deal in place before, but a lot of the work of getting it into Torque was going to fall on the GG staff, so it wasn't clear that it would end up being exactly what I think it can be. The merger allows me to take a more active role in flushing out how it will work.

Of course, the one thing the merger doesn't do is give everyone more time. So, unfortunately, not all these technology benefits are going to be realized as quickly as we'd all like. But they will happen.

Another one of Brian's concerns was that he wants tech not games, so the announcement that BT is joining GG to make more games leaves him uncertain. I strongly believe that you want us making games. That's because blue sky research is really not, in my experience, very useful. Research projects need grounding or else they get nowhere. New ideas come from new problems, and new problems come from new games. If you have someone sitting back in a chair thinking about what the issues are going to be for you guys while you make your games, you are going to get a bunch of elegant solutions to problems you don't experience, and hand wavey gestures when you bring up more mundane problems which these arm chair engineers didn't bother to think of.