Plan for J. Alan Atherton

So, I finally did the GID thing.

Since screenshots are the most important/interesting part of .plans, here they come.

This is the ghost model I made in 10 minutes just for the occasion.


Here's the "mansion" I built just for the occasion in about 1/2 hour.


This is a lot of ghosts chasing me. (Ok, fine, they're chasing you, whatever)


This is a couple platforms away from the very top level.


Here's a "beauty" screenshot to show how nice Torque looks with a good skybox.


In a nutshell, you have to get to a top platform before dying by being touched by ghosts. You shoot the ghosts, and you can jump higher. When you reach the next "level" (platform), your gravity becomes normal again (so you have to shoot more ghosts). It's pretty tricky. So it's kindof a FPS-arcade-platformer. In the dark. With ghosts. Boo.

Here's the storyline (to be read with a British accent):
Bob the orc just woke up after not eating dinner. He's hungry, and
he's hallucinating. Huh? Or is he on a different planet? There are
GHOSTS! And it's dark and creepy, even though it's daytime. Well,
Bob decides to try his nifty crossbow on the ghosts (with unlimited
incendiary bolts), and voila! They disappear! Not only that, but Bob
feels lighter! He can jump higher! As Bob looks around, he notices a
... er... building of sorts composed of cubes with stickers on them
that look like rocks. Some of these cubes are floating. Weird
planet. He sees one a long way up, and figures he must get up there.
Just because.

Oh, you want to play it? Too bad. Just kidding.
Sorry, I'm not kidding now. It was available for a year, but I must take it down. If you would like a copy, drop me an email and I'll send it or post it somewhere.

And here's the play by play of how the day went.

Hour 1 - Setting up TGE with a sparkling new project. Built ghost model, now trying to replace AIPlayer model with it. Chatting in IRC and searching GG forums like crazy.

Hour 2 - Ghost is exported and running the path in place of Kork (now named "Boo"). Modifying script and code to make player's gravity less every time a ghost is "killed". Hardly chatting, still searching GG.

At the 2.75 hour mark - Haha! Now the ghost fades quickly when killed, and the player's gravity is reduced! Big time progress! I hate to go to bed right now, but it is a little late.

Hour 4 - Ghosts appear at custom GhostDropPoints. Player has unlimited short-range shots. Working on AI to move ghosts now. Looked at AIGuard and AIPatrol, but decided AIPlayer will do for my simplicity, since the ghosts don't shoot.

Hour 5- Ghosts move around randomly. This behavior works great, since it makes them a little hard to hit. That will definitely be at least a factor in their runaway movement.

Hour 6.5 - Ghosts generally move toward player. Also fixed ghost model for eternaldark, so it can mount weapons (took forever!) in exchange for some skyboxes. Thanks to eternaldark for the skybox!

The 7th Guest (er, hour) - Firing crossbow now pushes player ever so slightly (when in the air). Now working on slightly better AI.

Hour 8 - Hah! The ghost AI is nearly done... they run away when you see them, but chase you when you don't. Only thing left is to make them go "home" if you're far away.

Hour 10 - Ghosts are all working very well. They now damage you when they touch, and it's kinda scary. The game's pretty good as-is, but I want to continue with the platforms plan. I'm now mapping a haunted-mansion-like thing to start it off.

The 11th Hour - Got the level structure built... the simple "mansion" is complete. Now it needs to be populated with ghosts and triggers... the triggers will reset gravity to normal. Need to find a way to make ghosts stay on their platforms.

Hour 12 - Added music, changed skybox, changed lighting to set appropriate mood. Scary! Still working on AI - platform glue.

Hour 13 (!) - Ghosts no longer fall off of their appropriate platform. They get stuck on the edge if you're chasing them, but that will have to wait until I finish other stuff. Now I've gotta get the gravity to go back to normal when a player reaches the next layer.

Hour 14 - Got the triggers in place to detect the next level (at least for ground level and level 1). Now I have the problem of an assert coming up all too often "Error, no plane possible!" It's annoying, and nobody really has a solution. All I have left is finishing the level triggers, then the level exit (victory!). Oh, I also made a splash screen and modified the "orc" title screen.

Hour 15 - The level triggers are done... the crashing seems to have gone away since I told Quark to use integral vertices (no floating point!) In my case, the level isn't "pretty" enough to matter, and you can't see any of the bad effects. The trouble now is that ghosts are falling off their platforms (they're not supposed to!) and so the bottom level is insanely hard. It's really close to done now, though!

Hour 16 - Tweaked play settings... ghosts do not damage as much (so you can stay alive!), put a cap on the gravity, so you don't float to the moon. Made the victory gui element, now trying to get it in.

Hour 19 - All done! Made HUD element to show current gravity level... when it's all the way down, that's the minimum gravity. I spent quite a bit of time trying to balance the gameplay, and it's better than it was. It's not terribly easy to beat. That said, I don't think it's impossible either.

So for a post-mortem, things went rather well. I think the game has a fun element to it, and I learned some good things. I didn't know how to get enemy AI into the game beforehand, and now I do. It's a lot easier than I anticipated. But then I've been messing with torque for a couple years. I also learned that exporting always takes longer than you think. Mapping takes a long time, too, but then I'm not a trained professional artist/mapper. I also learned that map2dif does not like floating-point coords... the game will crash with a "Error, no plane possible!" at some point with the map I made when floating point coords are used... but it hasn't crashed yet with integer vertices. I realized at about hour 17 that I could have done the gravity changes a little different, and that would have probably made the HUD element easier to make. I had to mess around with the HUD code for quite a while before it started working. The gameplay is a little dark (as in brightness), so it's hard to see the ghosts, and where you're going in general. I left it as dark as it is, because I ran out of time (had to go to work) and because I think it somewhat adds to the game. You're trying to catch ghosts which are trying to kill you! I had trouble with the ghost AI in the sense that they kept falling off of their platforms... either to chase you or evade you. It's weird because they don't always fall off, but sometimes. To "fix" that, the ghosts all die and respawn every 30-40 seconds. That means you still have ghosts to kill on the high platforms. This also means you have 20 ghosts chasing you on the ground level. And they also disappear randomly. The random disappearing actually seems pretty cool, because you turn around and see 10 ghosts, and a couple disappear, as if you scared them. That turned out to be a cool thing.

My opinion about all the torque "newbies" who feel they don't know anything (or really don't know anything) is they all need to do a GID at least once, and then they'll start to make connections. Just keep it simple.

Ghost catcher
1 man
19 man hours