Blog for David Montgomery-Blake at GarageGames.com

My Stuff and a little October Community News

David Montgomery-Blake — 2008-10-31T16:19:14+00:00

Well, I've had quite an interesting month. On the 15th, I ended up in the ER with my appendix trying to murder me. After a short, but successful, surgery, I'm back on my feet. The laproscopic incisions are healed and mostly gone. I still have a little pain if I try to lift heavy objects.

Which brings me to the second part of my good news. My wife and I just bought a house and have been moving in. It's a nice little place that we are pretty much making our own. We have a piano room which was are doing wall-to-wall bookshelves in as well. My friend Brin just put up our 6-foot French doors as an entry to it. We also have an office and a ton of storage space in the basement. So things are looking up.

But that's enough about my personal stuff. I have a rather useless blog for that. I decided to post this blog because I wanted to highlight some of the things that have been happening in the community this month. I usually do a news posting for this, but I did a rather large one that I had missed for a couple of months (and had a *TON* of stuff to parse through!). I thought I'd post the full October report here since I had posted a good chunk of Oct when I was called out by the community to keep it updated!

Cool Stuff
New Tutorial for Animation States in the TGB Platformer Kit on TDN
Lighting and Shadow Pack for TGB
Tutorial for creating a wood texture in Photoshop
Interesting investigation of OpenGL 2.0 in TGB
Nice discussion on iPhone optimization
FreeSpace-ish title in development
Dave Calabrese's presentation on game development
Sprinting with energy bar effect
Working with different video recording software
More Orcs vs Martians
Casual Connect in Hamburg
Useful, Generic Functions by Jeremy Easoz
Michael Vanderpool's snapping tool for TGE/A
Open Source for Game Developers - A New Debate on Business Models
Touch tutorial for iTGB
Information on using FMOD in TGEA

I'm heading out on my honeymoon here tomorrow morning, but I'll be posting a blog about some of the consistently cool projects that are happening in the community when I return.

Weddings and Indie Games Beyond GarageGame's Shores

David Montgomery-Blake — 2008-07-21T14:58:31+00:00

First of all, I'd like to let the community know that I just got married on the 13th of June (that's right, Friday the 13th!). Below is a picture of my beautiful wife Marni and my ugly mug! I look like I've got a secret! Some probably noticed (and more probably didn't) that I'm changing my name. We're both hyphenating our names so that we can win the most pretentious name award! Now we just need to go places where they announce us.

Quote:
"The Montgomery-Blakes have arrived..."

I have decided to do something somewhat different and most likely unexpected with this blog. Rather than writing about positive and cool things that are happening in the Torque community (read the forums and other blogs and news segments for such coolness!), I thought I would expand the bases to show some of the things that I think are cool in *other* indie engine communities.

I've been approached by several people on different forums because I'm the "community manager" (AKA "Guy Who Posts a Lot") here at GG, and am not shy of putting it in my profiles abroad. And doing so has allowed me to meet people who are working on some great indie projects! It has also allowed me to get a grip on how others feel about Torque and GarageGames as well as their chosen communities as their pockets of GameDev utopia. Some are advocates, some are fanboiz, some haters; all pretty cool people. In all, just like most communities where people set up shop!

I'm passionate about indie game development and love that indie game developers can get their games done regardless of the technology that they are using to do it. Being a Torque advocate, I would love to see all of these project in Torque, but I also understand that different engines are more applicable to different devstyles. I think this is also heartfelt on the part of the InstantAction team since their web API is tech-neutral, allowing developers using most of the engines out in the wild (and behind closed doors) with their tech.

UNITY 3D
Unity is a great Mac-based engine with a friendly artflow and environment oriented towards rapid development. It has a strong and supportive community and pretty much rocks around the clock! They've got some extremely talented people working on some excellent games as well (don't most of these great communities?)!

Infinite Onslaught
topic on Unity's Forums
Play with Unity Web Player

3rd Person Shooter
Topic on Unity Forums
Play with Unity Web Player

Acceleration Belt
Unity Topic
Site
Play with Unity Web Player

TraceOn
Forum topic
dev Blog
WebPlayer

Perth Racer
Unity Forum
web site / WebPlayer

AI Apocalypse
forum topic
website

Ridley from Metroid
Forum topic
web player

CONITEC 3D GAME STUDIO
If you've been around indie and hobbyist game development for a while, you've most likely heard of Conitec's 3D GameStudio A-series engines (A4/5/6/7/etc). The Lite-C language has improved the accessibility of the engine, as have the updated Lite-C tutorials. The WED tutorials that ship with A7 are still based on A5 and A6, but can be followed without difficulty. The user community is excellent and there is an extremely dedicated individual which produces some amazing tutorials and user magazines for the community. Mike Duggan, who wrote the Torque for Teens book also wrote the excellent Official Guide to 3D GameStudio

A7titude - an experimental game with style
Forum topic

The Disenfranchized
Forum topic

MechBuilder
Forum topic

NEO AXIS
NeoAxis is a C# engine that utilizes OGRE as its renderer and has a distinctive entity-based structure. It has some great and intuitive editor features. The licensing scheme is per-title and requires splash screens on all but the commercial and source versions of the license.

Transportando o Brasil (originally in B3D and now being ported to NA)
forum topic
web site

ALICE Chatterbot
(ALICE reference for context)
forum topic
YouTube Video
Company Blog about it

C64 Emulator
forum topic
YouTube Video

There are a ton more, but my blogging fingers are tired. There are some absolutely awesome games being developed in the Blitz, DarkBasic, GameCore (previously BeyondVirtual), and C4 communities as well. I'll just have to cover them sometime in the indeterminant future.

So, what's up Dave?

David Montgomery-Blake — 2008-05-04T17:40:53+00:00

If you're like me, and you're probably not, you get a lot of messages from young beautiful women on your general continent who want to share their webcam pics with you. I've also found that there are a lot of people out there willing to fund any venture I have if I send them my bank account number. I get at least fifty offers every morning from VC's looking to transfer money into my account before their country's economy collapses. If I get these offers and I'm not even working on a game, just think of the possibilities for those of you who are! So keep your head down and get working, because there is money out there.

TGE in the simu-sector
When I think of Torque, I usually think of the different projects that I see weekly around here. I usually forget about are the simulation titles that are out there in the serious games sector. Perhaps it is that I have my community-blinders on, but I think that a *lot* of people miss the larger arena that game engines can fill. We get caught up in platformers and XBox 360 deployment and forget about NASA simulations.

Three excellent projects were mentioned on Wired! this last weekend.

As a brief overview (for more, go read the article!), these serious games are being used to train intelligence operatives in a number of different tasks. The three games, all developed by Visual Purple LLC teach operatives how to organize their thoughts and actions in various situations. The article also highlights some of the training issues in utilizing the serious games sector in terms of the applicability of training programs.

Shed of the Dead
No, it is not another Uwe Boll Outhouse of the Dead movie. It's my completely fabricated title for Plastic Games' zombie game being made in TGE. One of the best things is that these are guys just like a lot of us. Wait. They are us if we look a little closer:
Paul Dana, Jason Sharp, Anthony Rosenbaum, Kirk Alberts.

Wait. I know those names! Anyone who cruises the forums even a tenth as much as I do should know those names! Especially Paul Dana, who has done some of the classes for TorqueSchool. That man is *everywhere*.

TorqueSchool
Also, speaking of TorqueSchool, I just wanted to make sure that I mentioned the amazing work done on the Character Creation for ArcaneFX class. I ended up have next to no time to actually spend on the class, sadly. But I absolutely loved the documentation and wished I could have participated in the actual classes.

Note: If you're taking a class that requires 300-600 pages of reading a week with a sum total of around 200 pages of typewritten synopses, don't sign up for another class.

So a thumbs-up Seven Up to TorqueSchool!

Well, okay, I guess I'd better get out of here and let you get back to some relevent blog reads. Make sure to read the various news posts that I've made pointing to a number of things going on in the community. There's some cool stuff and some great people out there. Jump into the fray and let me know what's going on in your project. One thing I really want to do is put together an interview session with the people still involved in the DreamGames contest. Just a thought, you know, for down the road...

Community Management

David Montgomery-Blake — 2007-12-14T18:43:16+00:00

First off, if you haven't read it yet, go read 80 tips on Community. It's a great game-oriented community development ideabase.

Next, I thought I would post a picture since no blog is complete without one and I've been pictureless on the last couple of blogs.

Next, if you hadn't noticed--and most people probably haven't--I have a new tag next to my name. Instead of Associate, it's Admin. The big-wow-scary implications of this tag is that I can now close topics. And I get to post news about what's happening on the forums. It also means that I read ALL of your posts even if I don't reply. So if I seem a little crazy, it's probably because I'm bleary-eyed from reading!

I'm working remotely, so I don't have direct access to the people involved in billing and such, but I tag them with anything that I see on the forums. The most common problems with the billing system is in the form of something like the RTS kit requiring TGE 1.4.2 and not being available to TGE 1.5.2 owners when it should be. Or resources not being opened up. Things like that. So I tag the people who can make changes happen.

When I was at IGC, I talked to a lot of people about some of the difficulties with community development, management, and transparency. Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of development time that needs to take place before some of the larger sweeping notions could take place. One of the most interesting and left-field was a 3D visualization ala Second Life or its ilk. While an interesting discussion, we were in a conundrum about how it would benefit the community. How would it be of more benefit than say, IRC? I could see something like an advanced interface to Sauerbraten being beneficial from a content creation community standpoint, but it was difficult to see where the 3D virtual world would be better than what is available now. It would certainly be cooler, but if it was anything like SL, it would definitely be laggier! We also talked about The Great Games Experiment and its featureset and how to utilize or manage it in a development setting.

But for all the discussions, it would take a rather huge chunk of web development time to create and maintain. Right now Stephen Zepp is working to put together a highly efficient transparent community for the development of Torque 2. And I hope it has the beginnings of some of the things that I discusses with a number of community members.

If you have any ideas, cool communities to look at as models, interesting thoughts on community or community management, then I would love to hear them. The community at GG is one of our greatest assets, and allowing the community to work together and find information in a user-friendly fashion goes a long way towards solving some of the major complaints that many community members have had in the past. It is, of course, not a solution for all complaints, but it would definitely help the community help itself or new members much more easily.

October - Community in Mini-Review

David Montgomery-Blake — 2007-11-01T16:52:43+00:00

It has been quite an interesting month for me. I thought I'd share a bit of it with you. Some people have cool stuff to blog about...I have other people's cool stuff to blog about.

I had a chance to attend IGC and meet a number of great developers. I had a chance to break bread with Ben Garney, Matt Fairfax, Pat Wilson, and Jay Moore (and he and Julie's beautiful Samoyed) through a serendipitous arrangement. I got to meet Jeff Tunnell and Josh Williams and Dave Wyand. I even got to stand behind Dave with a video camera while the Instant Action and Torque 2 sessions were happening as Dave monitored the IRC for his webcast. Magnus Blikstad even got a picture of me with a camera. I got a chance to meet Mike Rubin and play Vespers3D, which was one of my personal highlights--yes, I know, I could have seen it prior to that if I didn't have other obligations during Utah Indie Nights! I got a chance to play Marble Blast Ultra on IA and look at a ton of very cool games. I was even lucky enough to get to stay for the TorqueX workshop presented by Stephen Zepp to me, David Dougher, the Q/A team, and a couple of other yahoos. Unfortunately, it was announced too late for most conference attendees to go to--changing flights can be sketchy. Which meant more time for me to be there. I'm not gloating or anything, you understand...okay, I am.

The forums have been somewhat lively with a good amount of friendly and helpful activity around here as well throughout this month. Brian West has been working hard on his third-person GameCamera resource. It's quick, it's painless, and it works. Try it out. I implemented it and Jeremy Alessi's Double-Jump Resource and F.W. Hardijzer's Air Control Resource. It worked nicely, and other than the facing direction for the model, I had a very simple prototype for a Devil May Cryish control scheme. In only a few minutes of playing with resources. It wasn't very robust, but it is a beginning. Too bad I'm not making a 3D platformer.

Among my picks for "that's totally cool" this month are Shawn Simas' Integrating a Physics Engine into TorqueX, Bill Vee's DayOfWar Planetary Test Render, John Kanalakis' TorqueX prototypes (including a Guitar Hero-esque prototype), the port of MMOWorkshop's TGB Web Browser resource to TGE, Until I'm Gone, Mi Pueblito, and other really cool projects and posts.

And then there's a whole new level of coolness that has happened this month. Information about Torque 2 and Transparent Development from Stephen Zepp. The gist of it is that Torque 2 will be developed in full view of the community, breaking the silence from the TGEA era. GG will have full say on the development of Torque 2, but the community can weigh in, be heard, and be made aware as features are added, cut, refactored, etc. It also provides a short overview of the component based architecture shift in Torque technology.

Ben Garney released his Forest Pack, which is totally sweet! If you've been following the project, it allows developers to populate areas of their TGE terrain with trees. Lots and lots of trees. It makes creating forests and clearings much, much easier than placing a million trees by hand in the world editor. It should not be confused with Tom Spillman's work with TGEA and Speedtree, however.

There's a ton more stuff that has been happening in the community, but I thought I would highlight just a few cool things.

I'm planning on posting a blog about the community, community management, ideas for mentoring, and the like. I just need to organize my thoughts into digestible chunks to get feedback from the community and see what all of us want.

EDIT:
I can't believe I forgot to mention the totally sweet Yak Pack release!

X Time's a Charm.

David Montgomery-Blake — 2007-04-23T04:35:15+00:00

I have written this...or something resembling this...three times now here at GG. I have no idea what the previous two have gotten eaten. Fear the purge machine. Or in this case, the pre-purge machine.

I don't have the pipes to reiterate what I have typed several times, so I'll just link.

Fatal Farm: http://www.godsendproductions.com/fatalfarm/
Week 1: http://www.godsendproductions.com/fatalfarm/?p=4

Yeah. It sucks, I know.

Tomorrow I begin the lunchtime modeling. Me. At lunch while snarfing down something. And making a shovel or a coffee cup or something totally sweet that takes most professional artists years to make...oh wait...it's me. Shovels. Coffee. Untextured. I'll take care of that later.

So the gist is this:
Fatal Farm is an adventure-RPG-puzzle game. It's a hybrid from hell, spawned from really, really bad ideas about which genres should NEVER cross-pollinate. And somehow it stuck.

It is a survival "horror" (in the comic tongue-in-cheek sense) romantic adventure game with big-time RPG elements. As a co-worker used to exclaim loudly "KNOW YER ROLE!" I have now idea what it meant, but he watched wrestling a lot and it seemed appropriate to reference here. Because wrestling is popular among geeks, so I'm sure this blog will be rated a 5 for how totally cool and important it is to the community. I mean really, anything less is...well...stupid. You don't want to rate as stupid, right? 5 for the win. It's like the lottery, but with a better "dude, my vote totally counted" feeling. Except the lottery's not a vote. An no one really cares who youvote for. So up-vote me, damnit!

Relevant information:
- The contest is on. There are some damn cool contestants; people whom I have no business or reason to "compete" against. And actually, I'm not...really. I guess I am in some sense since I...er, entered. But not really. I'm more like herpes. I keep coming back to piss people off.

And jilt lovers.

- I am starting a "lunchtime model" project which will have me making the art assets (as bad as my horrible programmer art can make them). 5 days, 5 models. Sat and Sun are texturing/anim days since I won't have time on my lunch breaks to do that.

- Program a Day. Crap BlitzMax programs. Not anything that people will get excited about, but the kind of things that I hope they will Google when they have no clue about something. Right now they are so basic that it probably doesn't matter (and they are explained better elsewhere...like to official documentation...not that anyone reads it...). I like this project because there are no boundaries. If I'm lazy, I can be like "print something...anything"...and write hello world. I may have done it once, but no one checks in to see if I've done it twice! (or I could change the language...hehe).

- Play a Day. If anyone who has ever written anything has sat down and tried to write a complete idea within the time constraints that they had (lunches, breaks, the 10 minutes while waiting for dinner...), then they know my pain. In the last couple of days I have written one thing that I liked. I have written more that were juvenile, stupid, and completely and totally out of character for what I want...because they were easy...

- Blogs. Blogs are a requirement, and the thing that will probably happen is that I will sit here, realize that I have 2 hours to work, eat, and live in my schedule...and write something like this when I should be taking better care of myself.

So,anyway...no one has paid for my house (bastards, all of ya'll!).

But I'm going to post this to see if it posts, finally.

Good luck on all of the contest projects. There's some damn good stuff there! I hope I make it a week with new art and scripting to make it work. But it will probably dire horribly.

How is that for a positive blog?

What are you working on? A dead project.
Oh...Er, um...How dead.
Tolstoy dead.
My kids hated Toy Story.

???????

Buy me a house or "Is there money in games?" theme week

David Montgomery-Blake — 2006-03-15T23:49:45+00:00

As always, I was inspired by Jeff Tunnell's blog as well as a topic that I can't seem to find about just how much money we should expect to make in game development (enough to buy a used Porsche?). It was while sitting around avoiding my ethnography project on performance inhibitions that I had my own little Ah-Ha! moment. There is money to be made in games. And I'm just the guy to do it. I mean, if there are so many people playing so many games and paying money for the privilege, there must be a market, right? [Right.

So, how to penetrate this nebulous market? Some would say that having a game to release would be of importance. But I'm going to look at it from a different perspective. People want to play games. They pay to play games. But do they really like the games they play? If you happen to cruise GameFAQs, IGN or GameSpot, the routine answer would be "mostly, no." So rather than initially offering a game, I'm going to offer hype, dreams, and gimmick.

Introducing...

Buy Me a House

Currently: $0 out of $169,900

We all know how important it is to have a place to lay one's head and shower and play Xbox Live Arcade while dreaming about making games. Well, I'm sick of my current house so I need a new one. This one looks good. But I have a problem: I can't afford it.

This is where games come in. See, Carmack was happy with a fast car. Jeff with fast motorcycles. Me, I just want a place to live that's bigger than my current place and has a nice kitchen where I can make me a sandwich. This one has the added benefit of a game room.

Think of the games that I could imagine making in digs like that!

So I decided that I'd best research the business side before I jumped into this crazy world. I did a search on Amazon for Success in Business. After looking at the searches, I realized that this business stuff is hard. I didn't want to sit around and read about other people's success stories. I want to write my own. Well, the first couple of books were all "how I did it" tripe...but then I noticed that there was something more my style on that search page: a JVC in-dash CD player. I even had a remote so I could divert my attention from the road with a handheld device. I own a Dodge Caravan filled to the teeth with film equipment so the CD player seemed to be the most logical choice. I have the original cassette that came with it and it is not that friendly with tapes (or those CD convertor tape thingies). So I picked that up and got to thinking about how I would make my house come to be. Which means doing some hard thinking about making a game.

First I put in a FlipSyde CD to get in the design mood. As an avid reader of the forums here at Garage Games and the Stile Project, I remember that there was a forum topic about productivity and music. Now I had my thinker in action!

So, making money making games. Or hyping dream games that are going to be the next best things since sliced WoW. I had this idea for a game center structured somewhat like MySpace but with parental control over access to all content, chat capabilities, and oriented towards parents playing with their children and giving them a reason to monitor their children's internet activities (and not make it so bad later when they monitor them in the angsty teen years). There were a couple of problems that I could see with this. First, parents don't want to play with their children. There's a reason we have schools: inexpensive child care for today's disposable income workforce. Second, I didn't want to go through the COPPA. And lastly, the amount of money required for bandwidth and servers and all that good stuff to make a Children's MMO-MySpace/Xanga/RealArcade/Club Pogo/etc feasible would eat into the funds towards my house goal. That just can't happen.

So I had to use my currently available tools, which are actually quite varied. I'm a strong believer in the right tool for the right job. Since I own just about everything that GG sells, they're pretty much a shoe-in (of course, I own *everything* that Blitz Research sells and a good chunk of what TheGameMakers sells among a million other engines or SDK's or API's or "game languages"). I own a lot of modeling packages. But boy those things are complex. All those buttons and GUI's and options. It's entirely too much work to actually make a game, but if I don't make a killer hit game to kill WoW or Bejewelled or Unreal Tournament 2007, how will I ever get my house? That's the rub.

My next concept was a game like tetris, but with a cubic interface. You try to eat away the cube using Tetri-tactics. Pieces fly from left, right, top and bottom, and you can rotate the cube to put them in place. Kind of like a timed jigsaw puzzle where you are both adding to and destroying a cube made up of small tiles. Feasability and fun factor aside, I began thinking about this concept and what I could use to make it. I would have to write a custom scene object in TGE to do it, and while that might be fun (for someone), it also sounds like a lot of work. 3D shapes in TGB wouldn't be quite right becasue I would need a 3D system. So it looked like DarkBasic, BlitzMax (+ OpenGL and custom objects) or Blitz3D. Play Basic, Pure Basic, and Real Basic didn't quite seem to fit (that's a lot of BASICs!). So maybe DarkBasic. After all, I have that cool cloth pack so I can make things flap and the particle pack to make things sparkly. I hear casual gamers like sparkly things. It's like money in the bank! Ka-CHING!

So my killer game (it's CopyTradePatentMarked so don't steal it) for the casual market was well on its way to fruition. Which is a good thing because it was getting cold in my van. I had run out of gas and the CD player was running on battery power. And it was snowing. Great night. Time to go in, have a beer, play a little Wildlife Tycoon and maybe a little Rez. I could think of my Puzzle Pirates killer tomorrow while pushing my van to the service station.

So I headed inside, sat down, and began working on my RPG Tutorial for TGB. It will not be nearly as comprehensive as the one proposed on TDN. I'm trying to give the basics so that new people who want to make a RPG can find their footing and get an idea of how to organize extremely basic systems and data (I am shooting for Dragon Quest I; extremely simplistic combat, inventory, conversations, event system, etc).

Right now I'm not sure what the timeline is. I've been writing on gradual student crap (if I ever get my Masters, it will be amazing). But luckily spring break has given me a bit of a pause to get started (and transcribe interviews). Mainly I've been putting together some art assets (from Vue, Modo, and Poser) to work with it.

Maybe a little later I'll have more done on my mega scheme and be a little closer to owning a home with a bigger kitchen and a yard...and if I dream big enough, perhaps one of those kiddie pools that I can fill with milk and laugh at the neighbors because they just don't understand the eccentric lifestyle of an indie game developer with BIG dreams.