T2D in 12

What can you do with a few years of Macromedia Director experience and a will to have some fun making things on the screen move around along with a dozen hours of dedicated time to T2D? Well this weekend I found out. I started with Director 4 in school then used all versions through 8.5. The majority of my experience was working on boring ass glorified Powerpoint presentations for the corporate world. To break out of the monotony a friend and I developed a couple of simple games along the way. My first game with real art was when I was in school. I programmed a Frogger rip. But instead of using a frog, we used a chicken. The most notable vehicle in the game was a lowrider blasting a rap song as he drove by- second most notable was a bus full of nuns. That was fun and was a hit at the school. Ratblaster was a Southpark game where Kenny gets mistakenly identified by Uncle Jimbo as a "duck billed platypus" and is shot and killed. The objective is to shoot as many rats as you can before they eat Kenny's dead body. Morbid but fun. We also did a Shockwave Space Invaders rip with musical instruments for a guitar website. These simple games were made within a matter of days and part time at that. That is what I loved about Director. Easy and fairly powerful but somewhat lacking with performance and game development needs.

Enter 2006. I was struggling with the beast called TGE. While I learned enough to know that it was very capable, I also learned that I couldnt develop something on my own. I tried to get into the mindset of "its just Director in 3D". I loved programming in Lingo (Director scripting) but creating 3D art assets was not my trade. It was a love/hate relationship for a while. Then I came across a blog by Jeff T. (I think). In the blog he stated that GG saw T2D as a replacement for Director. I thought "Ok". Then the King Kong puzzle game came out that was developed with T2D. I played it and was addicted. The quality and performance is what stuck out for me. But I wasn't just addicted to the game but the idea of having a high performance Director in my hands. My mind began working to think about 2D games now and not 3D.

I bought T2D a couple months ago and went through a couple tutorials and was blown away by how easy it was to do really cool things. The particle system alone is worth the price of admission... The torquescript control of objects was simple and powerful and the performance blew me away after pushing the limits to see where it would choke. With the screen filled with cool particle effects and T2D only beginning to choke I was sold. It was just a matter of time before the boredom of not doing a game while knowing what I could do with the engine would catch up to me.

This weekend was my time. With about 6 hours on Saturday (I lost track of time until 4 am because I was so into this) and about 6 hours on Sunday I realized what was once impossible with Director is now limitless with T2D. Saturday I built the basic mechanics of a ship that the player can control, I had the player fire working, and thrusting with particles. It was very rewarding. Sunday was adding asteroids, collision, explosions, sound effects, and tweaking. I had to force myself to go to sleep. Sunday night I actually turned my computer back on at 11:30 and added the sound because my mind wouldnt shut-off, I was restless. I only used the art that came with T2D and the sound effects I found on a free sound effects site. I've always thought about doing an asteroids clone so here it is. No scoring yet, and there is some more that I would like to do but for the most part its here...

Here's a screenshot:

And here's the link to the demo if anyone is interested:
www.digitalblur.com/torque/t2d_space.rar