Blog for Justin Mette at GarageGames.com

Players Choice Awards

Justin Mette — 2006-08-08T21:15:33+00:00

Those that have been to past IGC's know that one of the most exciting aspects of the conference is seeing the other games and developer tools that everyone is working on. Most of the products are in early stages of development and ripe for feedback and inspirational discussions.

If you have ever shown off a game at IGC, you also know the pride you and your team feel watching people having fun playing your game! It's also a great learning experience to have your peers (and mentors) critique your game.

Each year there are games that rise to the top, capturing the attention of a large majority of attendees. You hear people talking about them over lunch, dinner, and even after hours. The Players Choice Awards are meant to recognize those games which manage to bring it all together and inspire those that play them.

This year, 21-6 is proud to host the Players Choice Awards. We have set up a site (playerschoice.21-6.net) to help organize the event. We encourage studios to register their games with us as early as possible. The site should get some decent exposure before and after the event so the more time your game is up there - the better! Of course, we will support on-site game registration as well.

We definitely want to have fun with this event and don't mean to formalize it too much. It just seemed appropriate to raise the bar on the awards show to match the increasing quality of games that are being shown each year.

I look forward to seeing everyone this year at the show.

Justin

TubeTwist-iness

Justin Mette — 2006-02-23T14:56:56+00:00

TubeTwist launched about 6 weeks ago on GarageGames.com and has been selling very well, converting at a whopping 6% (which is very high for a puzzle game made with Torque). The reviews for the game have been pretty good:

INSIDE MAC GAMES (8 out of 10) [Full Review]
"All in all, TubeTwist is an ingenious, fresh, and innovative new puzzle game. With its straightforward concept, simple execution, and its encouraging and empowering philosophy, this innovative game is accessible to the whole family, regardless of age or intellect."

MacWorld (4.5 out of 5.0) [Full Review]
"TubeTwist is a fantastic, family-friendly, puzzle game that features imaginative designs and great production values."

Myth Games (9 out of 10) [Full Review]
"TubeTwist is a refreshing addition to the puzzles genre. Don't just think games like this are for 'casual gamers' - give it a chance, it might be the most fun you've had since those first exciting few player kills in World of Warcraft."

We are working on a 1.1 patch that addresses some performance issues on lower end machines. This is always a nasty chore of PC game development that we hold off on until we soft launch the game and find out it's doing well (or not).

This time around, our performance problems were related to high poly counts on the tubes, ODE collision routines, and the particle system. We are hoping to have the 1.1 patch completed by GDC where TubeTwist will be on display the whole week in the IGF Pavilion.

Speaking of which the audience award nominations are open for IGF. If you dig TubeTwist (or want to support 21-6), please vote for TubeTwist here:

www.gamespot.com/misc/igf/index.html

Also related to IGF is an article Gamasutra posted about our journey developing the game. If you are interested, check it out here:

www.gamasutra.com/features/20060124/carless_01.shtml

Finally, it's been an exciting week for TubeTwist and 21-6 because we got our first retail deal! We partnered with Halycon Media to release the game in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria and it "hit store shelves" just this past week.

The game is already the 2nd most downloaded demo of all time on the Halycon Media site and also getting good reviews (although they can be hard to read in German)! The game has even been featured on a popular German Games TV program which you can watch here:

www.tubetwist.com/downloads/ct-magazin_tubetwist.mpg

If you watched the video, you will see that the game was completely translated to German including the voice-overs. For some reason, I totally dig seeing our games run in different languages (same feeling for Orbz on Xbox which ran in 5 languages).

Halycon did a great job with the box art, printed manuals, CD inserts, and Macroton-branded toys which are part of the promotional package to retail dealers. This is the box art:

We are thrilled that TubeTwist is getting off to a good start. The next step is to open up the game to more game portals (once the performance patch is finished) and hunt for that ever elusive domestic retail deal.

If you have yet to try the game, check out the free demo here:

www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=57

Holy links batman!

Monday Oct 10 16:22

Justin Mette — 2005-10-10T16:22:32+00:00

IGC 2005

I've attended every IGC that GarageGames has hosted and every year is a very special occasion. This year however exceeded my expectations. While there was no IndieJam and the LAN party may not have come together (due to a lack of working MP games hint, hint for anyone planning on attending next year with their game) the conference had a new level of energy like I've never experienced.

The Associates Day on Thursday was an amazing opportunity to learn where GG is going with technology and games (check out TDN!), meet the huge number of talented associates in the community, and to share with everyone our individual studio plans. This day reminded me most of past IGC's because of all of the familiar faces. With almost 25 GG employees and the large number of associates that attended this day may have been as big as the first IGC alone.

The rest of the weekend saw a surprising number of brand new faces and really contained an overall energy yet to be matched by any IGC. There were some fantastic games installed in the ShowOFF center representing a much higher level of production value than ever before. Even some of the big boys at the event like Microsoft, Oberon, PopCap, etc gave a lot of praise to the quality of Torque/Indie games shown off this year.

In particular I enjoyed trying out Air Ace (even with no dog fighting yet it was really fun to fly around), Realm Wars 2 (with cool hand-to-hand combat), Aerial Antics (new MP version), Wildlife Tycoon, Determinance, Shelled, Facade, Gish (also with new MP), Flash Bios, and of course the freaking hot Marble Blast Ultra on Xbox 360. The games this year really generated the most energy because there is absolutely no question now that this community is figuring out how to make games with Torque which is damn inspiring all the way around.

While not a game, I have to make mention of the increasingly spectacular Torque Lighting Kit from John Kabus and Synapse Gaming the next version of which was on full display in the ShowOFF Center. John is directly responsible for how awesome many of the games looked this year and will be blowing your socks off with the new tech that is on the way.

The sessions this year were quite varied and I actually attended more than any previous year including the Casual Gaming Roundtable, the Future of Physics and Gaming, Taking Advantage of Torque 2D, the Constructor Preview (I mean who would miss that!), Marketing your game from the other side, Professional Game Development, and Porting Torque to the PS2 and Beyond.

One of the biggest surprises for me was the amount of business opportunities now available for independent studios ... from Microsoft standing up the first day and telling us indies that we are the "glue" tying their technology circle and casual gaming strategy together to the numerous mentions of the kind of money that is now entering the casual game market which will provide growth opportunities for many of the studios in this community.

Seeing how awesome the games were this year from starving studios was really inspiring but to think how much better they will all be when these talented teams are actually funded and working full-time on them is pretty overwhelming. I've been part of this community since it started and watched it grow over the years. It was a proud weekend to see so many of the same studios and teams still working at it after all these years and realizing that we are all on the cusp of breaking into the industry full force with some of the coolest and most innovative games out there.

I'm looking forward to next year with more excitement and vigor than ever before. We are 'over the hump' so to speak as a community of independent game developers and now it's time to reap the rewards. There is no better time than now to have an indie studio or start one up!

There is probably a lot more to say about IGC and the business opportunities that have emerged but I have to pack and get on the road to Portland for a flight home to snowy Denver. Until next time...

(PS if you haven't seen pictures yet, check out Danny's site at www.flickr.com/photos/tags/indiegamescon/)

Sunday Aug 28 16:39

Justin Mette — 2005-08-28T16:39:03+00:00

21-6 News

So I look up from my desk and the calendar says August 28th. What? How could that be? Seriously, where did the last 8 months go?

Hey, why not surf to the 21-6.com site to read what happened this year! Hmmm, only two news item posts for the entire year that's not very helpful (nor impressive).

In true procrastinator's form, I finally did a little research and wrote up some news items to cover our extreme "roller coaster" of a year so far. Check it out...

January 3rd, 2005
Developer Spotlight
GarageGames.com posts a Developer Spotlight Interview with Justin Mette, president of 21-6 Productions. You can read the full interview here.

January 6th, 2005
Dave Myers
One of the founders of 21-6, Dave Myers, has announced his resignation from the company. We wish him well on his new venture, Lumpy Games.

January 17th, 2005
Orbz XBOX Alpha
Orbz for XBOX Live Arcade has passes the Alpha milestone showing off basic game play using a controller along with the first cut at the user interface.

January 20th, 2005
TubeTwist Beta
For the next two weeks, 21-6 will be running a public beta test of their addictive new puzzle game TubeTwist. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to tubetwist@21-6.com and also sign up for an account on www.tubetwist.com in order to access the Beta Forums.

February 1st, 2005
Chris Brethen
Chris Brethen moves to Colorado and joins 21-6 as a full time employee. Chris has been working with 21-6 on a part time basis for over 3 years and has been responsible for level design in Orbz and GravRally to this point. He will continue his work on those two projects along with some new contract work we will be taking on this year.

February 16th, 2006
Jason Richardson
Jason Richardson joins 21-6 as a full-time employee. Jason's primary role will be as a programmer on the upcoming Orbz build for XBOX Live Arcade.

March 7th, 2005
Game Developer's Conference
21-6 attends GDC and shows off both Orbz 3 and TubeTwist to many potential publishers. The games were received very well at the conference and the trip was an overall success.

March 18th, 2005
TubeTwist Preview
Laura McMasters from GamersInfo.net got her hands on the beta version of TubeTwist and wrote a great preview to wet your appetite only a couple short weeks before the game officially launches on GarageGames.com. Check out the full review here!

April 21st, 2005
Orbz XBOX Code Complete
Orbz for XBOX Live Arcade has passed the Code Complete milestone with Microsoft. All of the features in the game have been completed and the game now enters a rigorous testing phase.

May 2nd, 2005
Jason Richardson
Due to some unfortunate extenuating circumstances, Jason Richardson has been forced to leave 21-6. He will be missed.

May 5th, 2005
TubeTwist Rights
21-6 signs an agreement with Pinoli Software for the exclusive rights to the game TubeTwist which has been co-developed by both companies over the last 18 months.

May 11th, 2005
TubeTwist Delayed
After a long beta period and some publisher reviews of the game, 21-6 has decided to delay the release of TubeTwist in order to respond to their feedback, improve the overall production value of the game, and work on the Mac version.

June 5th, 2005
Swampboat Studios
21-6 teams up with independent game developer Swampboat Studios to co-develop an action/arcade game that can best be described as multi-player Robotron with a little bit of Total Carnage thrown in.

June 27th, 2005
Orbz XBOX Content Complete
Orbz for XBOX Live Arcade has passed the Content Complete milestone with Microsoft. This milestone build includes all final content for the game including art, audio, game logic, and 5 different languages worth of user interface (English, German, Italian, Spanish, and French).

July 1st, 2005
Office Space
21-6 secures office space ... well kinda. We have rented a house, moved Chris and Dave into it, and set up an office inside. This event marks a milestone for the company in that we actually have a team working together out of the same building all week long.

July 7th, 2005
Dave Calabrese
After 2 years of working with 21-6 on a part time basis, Dave Calabrese moves to Denver and becomes a full-time employee. Dave's responsibilities include level design, modeling, 2D art, and Torque scripting. His current projects include the soon to be released TubeTwist and Dimenxia.

August 9th, 2005
Orbz XBOX ZBR
Orbz for XBOX Live Arcade has passed the ZBR (Zero Bugs Release) milestone with Microsoft meaning there are no more bugs reported in the database. This was quite a feat to achieve considering there was a dedicated test team at Microsoft hammering on the game.

August 19th, 2005
German Games Convention
TubeTwist gets shown off during the 2005 German Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany to a very receptive crowd.

August 24th, 2005
Orbz XBOX Certification
Orbz for XBOX Live Arcade heads off to final Microsoft Certification. If all goes well, the game should be available for download and purchase on XBLA any week now.

August 26th, 2005
Music For Games
Paul Taylor writes about his experiences as an indie game composer. Our own Matt Sayre also discusses his approach to writing music for indie games. Check out the full article here.

Needless to say, we have a lot of crazy stories to tell at IGC this year. I'm looking forward to the panel I get to speak on at the conference about building a game studio. We've learned a lot this year as we try to evolve and I've been locked up in the office so long I just can't wait to blurt it all out. Or something like that ...

Hope to see many of you at IGC this year!

Tuesday Apr 26 18:45

Justin Mette — 2005-04-26T18:45:07+00:00

Where are they now?

It's been so long since I wrote a plan and talked about 21-6, I almost feel I need to re-introduce who we are .... and so I will. But first, I have to thank the GarageGames Grease Monkey for inspiring me to write a plan. Seeing all the other stuff going on in the community is very exciting and I felt compelled to start talking about what's going on over here as a result.

21-6 was founded back in January of 2000 and over the last 5 years has been through many wild chapters as we continue to try and figure out how to be a game company. We've been following the true "indie" path for years with a slew of part-timers cranking away after their days jobs to create games such as Orbz.

After 4 years of running pretty much the same formula things were getting difficult; causing a lot of strain on the company financially and also affecting the morale of the team. Trying to build products and a company on part-time power may be possible but we sure were struggling to figure out how.

So ... late last year we decided it was time to "crap or get off the pot" and a plan for growth was devised.

In these last few months since coming up with the plan, we've experienced more as a studio than we have in the last couple of years. The saddest of these changes was the loss of Dave Myers, one of our founders. You've probably read about it in his blog where he sums up the situation pretty well. When it's all said and done, we miss the "funk daddy" and hope he does well with Lumpy Games.

With the lows of evolution often come great highs and ours is no exception. Both Christopher Brethen and Jason Richardson have since joined 21-6 as full-time employees with Ryan Mette coming aboard this summer. It's been our dream during this entire journey to start bringing the part-time team into a full-time status and it's awesome to finally see that plan coming to fruition. With Chris, Jason, Ryan, and I spending our entire weeks focused on developing games for 21-6; it's been absolutely inspiring to be a part of.

Part of the plan for growth required us to start taking on more contract work in order to help pay the new salaries the company has to support. One nice thing about having a 5 year track record to build upon is the relationships and contacts in the industry we have made thus far. These contacts helped us find work rather quickly that not only pays the bills but allows us to continue refining our skills as game developers.

That said, we still are focused heavily on our own intellectual property including the soon to be release TubeTwist (www.tubetwist.com), Orbz for XBOX Live Arcade, Orbz 3 for the PC, and a new game we are keeping close to the chest until IGC where it will be debuted.

So who is 21-6 now? There are nine of us now including Ryan Mette, Christopher Brethen, Jason Richardson, Mike Nelson, Kevin Ostrowski, Dave Calabrese, Matt Sayre, Keith Johnston, and myself. Hey you know I just realized 2 + 1 + 6 = 9! Seriously, by this time next year we will hopefully be a complete full-time crew; cooking with some serious fire power.

We also have an extended family in folks like Logan Foster, Pascal Bos, and Nicolas Quijano who help us with contract work and our games when available. It's awesome to be part of such a thriving community of like-minded, passionate, and talented people. Whether they realize it or not, they are contributing in a big way to our evolution and we are proud to team up with them in making it happen.

Well, I have a ton more to write about like the projects we are working on now which are so darn cool and about some of the growing pains we are going through in trying to evolve the studio. However, time is short and the plate is full as they say so I must keep my plans to a reasonable length and simply write more of them!

Until next time...

PS. The only picture I have to show right now (since that's all the rave now in plans) is of the four horsemen (pictured left to right Chris, myself, Jason, and Ryan) all hard at work!

Tuesday Jun 15 4:23

Justin Mette — 2004-06-15T04:23:41+00:00

Torque AI

There's been a lot of .plans lately from the Torque AI team talking about all the gory details of our progress. I thought I would take a moment to recap how we got to this point because it's kind of a fun story.

The whole thing started back in August (or so) when 21-6 was working on a now defunct project called Incursion which was a pretty traditional FPS using the whole alien vs marine theme. As part of the project, we needed to add some more intelligent AI so that the bots could do more than run from point A to point B and hope the enemy was within range.

I started expanding the AI in Torque to follow the path between a series of waypoints defined by the level designer using a few updates to the Torque editor for placing and linking waypoints. The bot would choose a nearby enemy and follow the path to get as close as possible, firing its weapon when within range.

This worked pretty well at first, however after jumping in and fighting the bots for a while, I realized rather quickly that manually placing and linking these waypoints was going to be a major pain in the butt for a level designer especially on more complex levels. I also realized that it was way too easy for the bot to get off the waypoint path from explosions, collisions with other players, etc. Once off the path, the bots really couldn't reliably get back on it. For example falling off a bridge or having a large tree in its path caused the bot to be hopelessly lost.

Then one morning I had the idea to automatically generate a graph of connected nodes around the terrain that the bots could use to navigate back on to the pre-defined routes. I started with brute force, shooting raycasts from the sky down to the terrain at regular intervals and linking them together with a quick distance check algorithm.

Ah yes, this was working out nicely as the bots were able to find their way back to the route with a light-weight path finding algorithm I snagged off the net. We were cooking with gas and loving it ... until Chris came up with a sweet multi-level interior complete with stairs, ramps, bridges, etc. Although it was cool to watch the bots patrol through the new interior the NavGraph was a total mess inside the interior and bots were getting stuck everywhere.

Back to the drawing board I went trying to improve the NavGraph generation process to handle complex, multi-level interiors. Using the basic raycast algorithm described earlier, I extended it to find the ceilings and floors of every level in the interior.

I was so very proud of my fancy new NavGraph (how geeky) that I quickly started fighting our beloved bots yet again only to find that they continued to get stuck on crates, stairs, and pretty much any obstacle in their path whenever they strayed from the pre-defined routes.

Talk about doing this the hard way. We really didn't have the intention of building this complex AI system but at each evolution it became more and more evident that quick answers weren't going to cut it. We needed to bring in the big guns namingly A* path finding. Now that we had a pretty decent graph of connected nodes, we really didn't need those pre-defined waypoint routes to get around if we had a good path finding system.

So off I went to go learn A*. This was a fun little project and I learned a lot like how expensive it was to do A* with complex navigation graphs. The first implementations were extremely memory intensive and slow as hell. That's when I got all warm and fuzzy with the Torque Profiler which pointed me in the direction of the bottlenecks. More reading and weeks of optimizations later the A* algorithm ended up being pretty fast and even distributed over multiple "think ticks" to help balance the load of many bots path finding at once.

Ah finally, a good solid path finding foundation. Now it was finally time to fight that damn Orc and show him who is boss! But alas, the bots were still getting stuck and couldn't handle getting in and out of interiors very well especially for those that were rotated or scaled in the mission environment. "You have to be kidding me..." I said as I stared at the problem areas of the FPS Starter Kit mission.

The next few weeks were spent refining (yet again) the generation of the NavGraph. Improvements included generating nodes for interiors in local space so that regardless of their rotation in the mission, the nodes were always in the same place. Also, a more dense series of nodes needed to be placed around the interiors to help the bots find their way in and out of the doors.

These improvements and others actually resulted in a pretty solid experience. I implemented a quick "follow mode" for the bots and armed them with weapons. They actually were chasing me in and out of the interiors, up stairs, cutting me off on the opposite side of bridges, etc in other words, the bots were starting to give me a challenge.

It was about this time that Stefan "Beffy" Moises and Phil Carlisle started posting more about their work on AI for Torque. They were coming at the problem from a different angle dealing with real-time steering (obstacle avoidance) and behaviors (patrolling, chasing, fleeing, etc). I knew I had a good path finding foundation but had not really even started on the higher level functions. It was a perfect match of code, skills, and vision between the three of us.

After getting acquainted with each other's work, we decided that combining forces was the best way to get all this work done in a timely manner. So Stefan took over for me with the foundational aspects of automatic NavGraph generation, path finding, and obstacle avoidance. He has been extending that functionality in fantastic ways like node occlusion brushes, terrain material occlusion, and fixes for many of the problems that were yet to be solved when I worked on the code.

Stefan's Recent Related Plans
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5824
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5716
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5687
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5673

Knowing that we had a good foundation of path finding, Phil has been implementing the higher level brain functions for the bots using a task/action system giving the bot programmers complete script-level access to all functionality. In other words, the final piece to this long and winding road.

Phil's Recent Related Plans
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5842
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5814
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5727
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5699

We still had one area of the project that wasn't covered which is editor support for viewing and manipulating the NavGraph as well as defining the tasks and actions for each bot to obey. Thankfully, Nicolas Quijano jumped into IRC one day to ask if he could help with the project. Ah Nicolas, what timing indeed! Expect to see some .plans from Nic in the near future showing off his work on the project.

So what is my role on the project now? Basically to make sure that we keep the scope of the project reasonable, make sure everyone is moving forward without obstacles, and lending assistance to the technical brainstorming sessions on how to solve the problems we still face in reaching our goals (see recent .plans from Stefan and Phil for more details there).

All in all, we have a rock solid team of experienced Torque programmers working on this project and I am honored to be in such great company.

We meet every week, Thursday at 12PM EST in #torqueai on the irc.maxgaming.net servers. If anyone is interested in learning more about our progress, please don't hesitate to drop in and ask questions or lend some brain power to the effort.

What's next for the Torque AI team? Well, we are considering taking all these months of work and putting it into a "Bot Pack" for FPS style games that would be sold here on GG like other content packs. This won't be an end-all-be-all solution because most higher-level AI is very game specific. What it will provide is a foundation for an FPS game that can be built upon very quickly leaving the majority of the work to programming the game-specific intelligence for bots.

What do you all think would you buy a Bot Pack that had an automatically generated navigation graph, distributed and optimized A* path finding, a fully scriptable behavior framework, and editor support?

Monday Mar 15 16:42

Justin Mette — 2004-03-15T16:42:01+00:00

Torque AI

Matthew Fairfax has been inspiring me to write more about some of the cool technical stuff we are working on here at 21-6. His .plans are always so cool to read and include fun screen shots. I'm going to follow suit.

Over the past 3 months or so, I've been working on teaching bots how to navigate Torque missions using a combination of an auto-generated navigation graph and A* path finding. This technology is being developed as part of a project we are working on with GarageGames. Early on in the project, we decided that this AI code should be rolled back into Torque for everyone to benefit from and help evolve.

I had also read that Stefan and Phil were working on some higher level AI code including obstacle avoidance and a task management system. It ends up that they had the same thoughts of integrating their code back into Torque. As we discussed the technologies we had both been developing there was some great alignment in functionality and the two sets of code should fit together nicely, providing a relatively complete solution.

Over the last couple weeks; Rick O has graciously set up a branch of Torque for us to work in, I have ported my code over to this new branch, Stefan is re-working his steering/avoidance code to use the path finding architecture, and Phil is designing the higher level task management system.

Now for some tech-talk!

Navigation Graph
The foundation of "path finding" is a navigation graph, which is essentially a collection of nodes that are linked together to form a grid. Most of the time spent over these last 3 months has been on automatically generating this navigation graph (NavGraph) for a Torque mission.

Auto-generating the NavGraph requires many steps including processing individual interiors (including multi-level), terrain, water, and static objects placed outdoors. Essentially, the algorithm uses a series of ray casts to place nodes throughout the mission area.

Node Generation
Interiors are processed individually in order for node placement to be consistent, regardless of the rotation of the interior in the mission. The terrain around interiors will have tighter node placement than open areas of the terrain in an effort to link entrances of the interior to nearby terrain.

As mentioned earlier, each level of a multi-level interior will be mapped properly. This was tricky to accomplish with ray casts because of solid brushes in an interior. The NavGraph generation process can subsequently take a while to process which is why the graph is cached (much like a .ml lighting file).

Link Generation
The next phase of NavGraph generation deals with linking the nodes together. A series of filters are used to determine whether two nodes should be linked together most have to do with whether a player model can travel from one node to the next unobstructed. There is also a filter that will reject potential links based on their slope which allows you to block off areas of your level from bot navigation using height.

In order to keep the NavGraph simple to navigate, each node will only have 8 links one in each 45 degree quadrant around the node. The final phase of NavGraph generation will go through and filter down links to meet this requirement. The result allows tight and loose grids to be merged together without hundreds of needless links.

Customization
There are going to be many configurable options for NavGraph generation as we have found many parameters to be game-specific. For example, the node placement algorithms currently have a filter that checks to see whether a 2m tall player model can stand on that node unobstructed. If you were making a racing game, this filter would be implemented differently.

To support this level of customization there will be some C++ classes you can derive from and implement game specific features. A great example of these classes would be filters for node placement and link generation.

Path Finding
Implementing A* path finding was actually not that difficult once I learned how the algorithm worked. Instead, most of the time has been spent figuring out how to get the algorithm to perform well when generating long complex paths. I spent many hours with the Torque Profiler to find bottlenecks and fix them. If you don't use the Torque Profiler and are trying to solve performance issues you are missing out on a valuable tool. It really is amazing.

While I'm sure there are many more optimizations that can be made to the current A* implementation, it became obvious that long complex paths were still going to take a while to calculate. Therefore, I also implemented the ability to distribute the processing over time.

Each bot will now calculate a small percentage of the overall path each "tick" that it thinks instead of all at once. This allows many bots to be calculating paths simultaneously without bogging down the CPU.

Just recently, Stefan added the use of splines for the generated paths. This is a great addition. Check out these screen shots.

Follow Mode
To show off all this path finding goodness, I wrote a "follow" mode for the AIPlayer class. The bot will calculate a path to the "follow object" and then start traversing it. Right after the bot calculates the first path and starts moving along it, he immediately starts calculating a new path to the target. When the new path is finally generated, it is merged with the current path. Essentially, the bot is continuously calculating a new path to the target allowing it to follow a moving target.

Summary
A few people have asked when this project will be done; but that's really hard for us to answer. We all are working on other projects that take higher priority and are only working on Torque AI when we can find the time. I would hope that we could have a basic framework in place after a couple of months but that's really speculation at this point.

We will do our best to post progress in .plans throughout the project.

To be continued...

Sunday Nov 30 17:16

Justin Mette — 2003-11-30T17:16:11+00:00

Enjoying The Ride

After reading Davis's post-turkey novel of a .plan, I felt inspired to take a snap-shot in time and write about some cool things going on, so here goes...

21-6 has a great opportunity to show off GravRally at MacWorld in early January and are hastily working to get the Mac build running in time. It looks like David Chait will be helping us again with GravRally supporting the Mac just as he did with Orbz that's great news! We are also buying a Mac in order to do builds and testing which is way cool can't wait to get my hands dirty and extend our automated build system to generate Mac builds as well as Windows builds.

We also put together a plan for the Alpha, Beta, and Final release of GravRally which you can read more about on the official GravRally Web Site if you are interested.

December is going to be a nail-biting month for Orbz being in two different sets of awards Game Tunnel GOTY Awards and IGF. As you probably saw in Jay's news post, Orbz is up for 4 categories at least in the Game Tunnel GOTY Awards, which is outright awesome. We also entered Orbz into the IGC this year and as far as I'm concerned, getting a top ten slot is equivalent to winning because of the free ticket to GDC and overall media exposure. Game Tunnel winners and IGC top-ten finalists will all be announced in the next couple of weeks and the excitement is building.

In other interesting Torque news, it looks like I will now have two consulting gigs that entail teaching people how to use Torque. After working with the engine for over 2 years now, I'm quite comfortable with most of it enough to teach people how to use it to build their games and applications. Every once in a while though I get hit with a doozy of a question and have to dig in and learn a new area. It's just amazing how much this engine does and that we keep on discovering. Anyway, it's really cool to get paid to teach others how to use the engine and is really a welcome source of revenue that cropped up unexpectedly.

The rest of my work time lately has been spent programming on a new game and writing content for an accompanying book both of which are too early to make any official announcements on. One of the more exciting programming tasks I have been on in a while includes developing the AI for this game. I am seriously addicted to teaching bots how to play games and this whole effort has been a great distraction from the normal business/management type of stuff I typically have to do.

On a final note I've broken my old habit from this past year of NOT playing games. Each week, I'm dedicating some time to my XBOX now and playing all sorts of cool stuff including KOTOR (love that game), Midtown Madness 3, Top Spin, and Links 2004. I'll have to say that XSN Sports is a very cool additional to online console gaming if you haven't checked it out, it's definitely worth a look.

Wednesday Nov 12 14:36

Justin Mette — 2003-11-12T14:36:48+00:00

Pretty Good Solitaire

Back in early August, I was reading A Shareware Developers Life which is a BLOG by Thomas Warfield and his experiences with developing shareware over the last decade. Thomas mentioned that he was interested in licensing a game or contracting out development for a game. I emailed Thomas and a few conversations later we agreed to develop 3 Java web games based on his popular Pretty Good Solitaire game.

I had never written a Solitaire game before and had worked with Java only for business applications. Over the summer, I learned a lot about using Java 1.1 (lowest common denominator) for games and about Solitaire itself. Overall it was a fantastic project and went smooth as silk Thomas was great to work with.

Just last week, the games were posted on the Goodsol Web Site and Thomas had some nice things to say about 21-6 in his BLOG (much appreciated!). After seeing the games up on his site, I got all inspired to put them up on the 21-6 site and show off our hard work while also promoting Pretty Good Solitaire.

Long story short, the 3 web games are now live on the 21-6 site and we are also an affiliate of Goodsol Development (through RegNow) which means we get a small chunk of any sale referral that comes from 21-6.

In the spirit of Viral Indie Marketing 101, please check out these free Solitaire games and pass along the link to anyone you know who might also enjoy them. The full version of the game has over 500 variations of Solitaire and also has some unique features that you won't find in other Solitaire games.

www.21-6.com/goodsol.asp

... and now ... back to your regularly scheduled program ...

Thursday Oct 30 16:51

Justin Mette — 2003-10-30T16:51:28+00:00

GravRally on G4 Pulse!

I thought I'd take a moment and share some good news. We've just received word that GravRally will be highlighted on The Pulse, a show on the G4 cable channel. Footage from the game will be aired starting this Friday, the 31st and run until next Friday.

This coverage of GravRally as well as last year's coverage of Orbz on G4 both were direct results from winning the Players Choice Awards at IGC. It's absolutely amazing to see how much traction IGC already has in the industry and it's only gonna get better.

Along these lines I've already done 4 interviews about GravRally/Orbz/21-6 (and even Myrmidon surprisingly), had my 15 minutes of fame on the Gamesome Mac radio show a couple Monday's ago, and even been contacted by an agency interested in representing GravRally to box/console publishers. We're probably not ready for something so grand but it's sure nice to generate that kind of heat!

Also, just before IGC a Google search on "GravRally" resulted in zero hits and in only a few short weeks, there are now 7 pages of hits.

My point? The power of IGC should not be under estimated...

Much thanks to GarageGames for opening all of these doors :)