Plan for Ryan Ackley

[note: I reposted this here from my personal development journal. I thought some people here might be interested]

As I stated in my previous dev journal entry, I have chosen Garagegames's Torque2D platform as my development environment for my current development. I purchased it on a whim way back on march 4th, just a few days after it went live. Shortly thereafter, I put together a basic pong clone in one afternoon (it had its issues, but was basically "done"), as well as a quick demo of an overhead actionRPG (well, moving the character about on one screen anyhow, kinda Zelda-ish). These two quick demos I put together reinforced my decision to go with t2d. Shortly thereafter, however, things got busy at my day job, and I set t2d aside for a few months.

Flash forward to early july. Things are still busy at work, but I still want to move ahead. I plan to submit at least one game to IGF next year, and maybe, if I get something together sharpish, something to some other indie game competition (I recently stumbled across slamdance, so maybe there). IGF is still the target. Now, I'm starting to do some actual thinking about a game I want to develop, how it would be implemented, etc, and that leads me to the actual topic of this entry:

Beta releases. Or, in this case, "Early Adopter" release. I understood the state of things when I dropped my cash on T2D, and don't feel the least bit bad about it. However, there are alot of hurdles to completing a game:

There is no "built in support" for games, or at least, game types. What I mean is, you have ability to use sprites, tilemaps, etc. All the major required objects and functions are there. However, building a game requires you to develop some sort of what I'll call "framework" for your game. As an example, the original Torque Gaming Engine came with "Starter.fps" which was a very basic FPS. All it had was a few demo levels, a character, etc. But you could download it and play it, extend it, etc. With T2D, there have been 2 "demos" released, and if you own the licence, you get the script source of these demos. One is a side scrolling shooter game (think darius twin, or something similar). However, this is just one level with random enemies, etc. It is indeed impressive, however it really isn't much of a "game". The other demo is a non-interactive fish demo, where some of the fancier graphics are shown off, and static images of fish float by. Again, a nice inclusion, but not really helpful (to me, at least). T2D is like a blank canvas, which can be both good and bad (since everyone is forced to implement stuff themselves, they wont look the same, which is my problem with alot of the TGE screenshots I see on GG, you can almost always tell it is a TGE game). Developing my own "Game Framework" in T2D has been interesting thus far, and I would say rewarding (I know quite a bit more about the engine itself because of it), but the few games I want to make are still a bit of a ways off, since I am reinventing the wheel of platformer games (in this particular case). The other positive of this "blank canvas" approach is that if I want to make it as a "real" game developer, indie or otherwise, I should be able to develop these types of things. It just doesn't get that "Instant satisfaction" feel (again, that isn't bad, I just have a short attention span sometimes :)

The engine also isn't "Feature complete." Again, in this case, not quite a negative, but close. We've been told that network aware objects are "coming", Updates to this file format are "coming", this editor is "coming", etc. You can see where I am going with this. Some people might complain about this, but (due to my nearly 100% sunny disposition), I see the positives. As early adopters, we have some influence in the final product. If I thought up some whiz-bang feature that would be a killer inclusion to T2D, I have no doubts that Melv would at least consider it. That is a pretty cool position to be in. Now, I haven't worked with T2D to the point where I feel I could really bitch and moan about stuff thats currently in the pipe. Also, the other part of "missing" features is that, again, I get a chance to dig in and do it myself, thus learning more about other aspects of development. I am a real DIY guy, and if something doesn't quite suit me, I'll be inclined to dig in and at least pretend to attempt it myself. Again, good lessions, bad for my attention span.

However, the light at the end of the tunnel is coming. Updates are "coming soon", hopefully to fix some of these (and other issues the community has). The other positive is the community itself. I have learned more from the community at GG.com than the included documentation (well, maybe the same amount, but still). Like I said before, if I had it to do all over again, I'd buy T2D again. I really like where the project is going, where the community is going, and what is currently avilable. (that, and I already was well versed in torquescript). Maybe I should have rethought the name of this journal entry. I don't have a problem with the beta. It makes things a little more, erm, "Interesting" is all.

[sorry if that seems rambling and has no point. Comments are welcome]