Plan for John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder)

To me GID is an excellent chance to hone game design and development skills. In the last GID we proved to ourselves that we're capable of developing clever and addictive game play. The demo of our game was very well received by our testers - plus it's an idea that was easy to design and develop, and can easily be polished up later.

For this GID we decided to hone our artistic skills, so we focused purely on art content...


Getting Started

In order to get started we needed to choose a simple existing game play to mimic. We chose a 'kill-the-man' style game, where one player has an item and everyone else tries to kill him (simple enough :). In order to keep the game fast-paced we decided to have the player with the item score points by depositing the item in another location in the level to prevent him from just hiding and ruining the fun.

We decided to go with the GID theme of ghosts, which sounded cool and eliminated the need to think of our own theme. Because our focus was on artwork we didn't make up a story, or a reason for the objects to exist in the game - our thought process only involved thinking of spooky things and creating them. So the game consists of a spooky graveyard, a mad monk, and a demon face... thing... :)


Division of Work

The division of work for this GID was a little different than in the last, mainly because of the difference in game styles, but also because we were all trying to expand our abilities a bit. I led the team and worked on coding again, but this time I spent at most 20 minutes on coding and instead focused on designing/modeling the game's organic objects (trees, the face, terrain, ...). Alex worked on interior design/modeling, tombstone design, and texture creation (he was also in-charge of pushing the limits of map2dif :p). Ross worked on designing/modeling the characters, tombstone modeling, and came up with the basic game play idea.

I've always had artistic interests, but my skills were somewhat limited to designing and modeling industrial objects, and this only seemed to work because I used a drafting type approach to modeling (which doesn't translate at all to modeling organic objects). I specifically took on the challenge of modeling the organic objects for this game in order to force myself to adapt to new techniques and concepts in modeling. Personally I'm pleased with the results, I think with some time and practice I can really develop my artistic ability further.

Also it's amazing to see how much our skills have developed month to month, and how much our overall understanding of what needs done and who should attempt it, has progressed. Every time we work on a project I'm amazed at how well different components of the game come together regardless of who worked on which piece - it all works relatively seamlessly.

Overall things went very smoothly - even though we originally thought the amount of content was a little too aggressive everything turned out fine. The only major stumbling block was the 4 hours it took to get our character models into Torque (leaving me with only 20 hours of GID time), which involved much trial and error, many crashes, and a lot of colorful language (exporting should never take longer than modeling).


Time Management

In the first hour or so we had the total game play nailed down, which is this; the players (which are monks) race to enter a spot on the terrain (marked by a symbol or something), which turns only the first person into a ghost, that player then needs to enter a second spot on the terrain to score a point (the player then turns back into a monk), of course the other players try to stop the ghost player from scoring by killing him (killing a ghost - how does that work? :).

By hour 8 we had a lot of our content modeled (some without textures) and into our staging area where we could look at the models in engine.



Towards the later part of the event (hour 16 or so), things got a little weird. Although we were clearly on schedule the mission wasn't created yet, and it felt strange to be on track, but without something solid to show for it. Though I do have to say that our project and time management was sound as we completed all of our work and the mission with in 22 hours (even with the 4 hours wasted on exporting), which gave us some time to tweak the mission a little more.


The Result

Besides having another cool little game under our belts, we had a blast, and we expanded our skills into areas we may not have tried before.

Here are a few shots from the game (some are early shots made before the background forest was added)...

The goal is to run in here when you're a ghost:



This spot turns you into a ghost:



Ghost hunter lurking at a crypt:



Hanging out near a tree:



And in the cemetery:



A small aerial view:



And a quick video of the action:

-video(6M - divx 5.1)


I think our GID games are excellent examples of what can be done in Torque with little or no coding. These are all based on the Lighting Pack (aka: Torque Lighting Kit), which provides all of the bright and dark mood lighting, mission tools, and special effects necessary to work efficiently without touching any code. The games range from puzzle games to standard first person shooters, but all look unique and all were complete in under 24 hours.

Here are the other GID like events we've had:

-GID 13 - Fusion
-Team Building - 24 hour game play experiment


As always I'm already looking forward to the next GID, and I'm already thinking up a few good ideas... :)

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming