Torque Game Engine DocumentationVersion 1.3.x
| Torque Game Engine Documentation Version 1.3.x |
With a realistic design to begin building from, you'll need to start the process of identifying the major components needed to complete your game. Look at the major gameplay systems in your design and figure out what kind of technologies will be needed to support them.
Keep it simple-
At this point, there is no need to get extremely detailed in your technology descriptions. In fact, you should avoid doing so as much as possible. Building up a detailed description and analysis of a piece of technology that may end up getting cut later will simply be a waste of time.
So, keep things pretty much to bullet-points at this stage. Your goal here is to get to the Prototyping stage as quickly as possible. Identify the big components you need to build-- the large areas you'll need to focus on-- and move on.
For example, with Marble Blast, we knew immediately that core to the game's success would be a fun marble physics system. This would be a major facet of the gameplay, and we knew to focus on the marble physics heavily right from the start.
The racing areas are the other most important part of Marble Blast's gameplay. Having great marble physics wouldn't matter much if the areas the marble moved around in were boring. So, we knew here as well that we'd need to focus on our level designs. In particular, we knew we wanted big, complex, curvy, moving areas to play on.
Identifying these key components early helped us to focus our efforts on the most important aspects of the game.
At this point, we might sound pretty slick. It seems that we identified all the right stuff. As it turns out though, things weren't quite as smooth as they may seem right now. Let's see the first example of something we focused on early, but that ended up getting cut later:
Did you know Marble Blast was originally going to be a multiplayer game? It sounded awfully fun-- we envisioned playing with friends, racing for hair-line finishes, ramming each other off the tracks, talking trash, and participating in many other multiplayer shenanigans. So, at the beginning stages, we identified multiplayer as a core technology area that needed to be focused on. Of course, this turned out not to be the case at all.
As you will see, even with a realistic initial game design, a lot of revision and refinement will be necessary before your game is truly buttoned down. Even the most experienced game-maker faces this fact. In truth, the more experienced you are, the more you'll recognize just how necessary this process of gradual refinement is to developing a top-quality game.
That's why it's important to identify what broad technology areas you think you'll need to focus on right away. Quickly getting your game to the prototyping and refinement stage is absolutely essential.
