Blog for Timothy Aste at GarageGames.com

Legions @ GDC

Timothy Aste — 2008-03-04T02:21:38+00:00

GDC was fun this year, had it a bit different as was just there showing of the game to press and doing demos in the meeting room. As always, very inspiring event to see what is going on around the industry as a whole and spotting hot trends and cool new stuff. One thing about GDC is that as much as it stays the same, the more it changes! Tons of opportunity right now for indie devs out there.

Always fun to meet up and hang out with community peeps (Sickhead, SynapseGaming, MaxGaming) and other non indie industry familiar faces and friends.

Probably best press coverage:

www.gametrailers.com/player/30963.html
shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=789

Had some big name people come by and give the thumbs up which was a nice feeling.

Anyhow, 5 very talented devs (well 4) putting in a LOT of long hours to get to this point on Legions. Todd Pickens, Matt Ostgard, Thomas Buscaglia and Adam Larson. I help out here or there too!

We keep track of our forums pretty well over here:

http://forum.beta.instantaction.com/smf/index.php/board,23.0.html

Anyhow, Legions got some good press down there, here's a quick summary if you missed it (lots of this is repeat):

www.gamevalor.com/?p=627/fallen-empires-legion-developer-walkthrough
www.legionsplayers.com/
www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=789
feed.splash.de/2008/02/24/fallen-empire-betaphase-ende-marz/
www.tomshardware.com/forum/99187-13-tribes-sequel-sort
www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/51444
www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1174
ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/36930/Fallen-Empire-Legions-Trailer-Screenshots
www.webdonews.fr/jeux-video/2008/02/22/gdc-fallen-empire-legions-illustre/
whatthecrap.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/fallen-empire-legions-developer-walkthrough
futuremark.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=75750
www.combatsim.com/story.php?id=7910
fulgore.net/8554/gdc-08-exclusive-fallen-empires-shakycam.html
www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=529425
whatthecrap.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/fallen-empire-legions-developer-walkthrough...
www.dailymotion.com/video/x4gulb_fallen-empire-legions-gdc-trailer_videogames
fangaming.com/fileinfo.php?fileid=3146&gameid=670
shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=789
www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=49910
www.n4g.com/News-112313.aspx
www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3166479
hhev.nerdelphia.com/video-game-news/02/21/2008/gdc-08-fallen-empires-legions/
fulgore.net/8535/fallen-empire-legions-trailer-gdc-2008.html
gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=11746
www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=242723
www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=19701

Video from GDC

Timothy Aste — 2007-09-20T23:46:59+00:00

Hey guys-

Been since March since I've made a .plan so I'll keep this sweet. I forgot to put up a video of the tech demo we showed off at GDC. I put it up on YouTube, and also linked a .wmv file locally that's slightly higher quality.

I had a couple people email on how I achieved some of these effects, there is nothing custom here (I was crunched to do it in 3 days to get it done in time for GDC). The lava is simply a standard material with $scroll flags on it, and glow masking (flag set to glow, masked in alpha channel). The dripping lava is a combination of an animated DTS file with glow flag on for the bright drops, and a precipitation block (5x5 that doesn't follow the player) for the drops around it to add volume). I have a couple volumetric lights (turned way down so they don't chug) on the actual swing lights, and also overlayed on the lava chutes to give it a bloom, without having to turn the overall scene bloom up to the point of craziness. The character is just a diffuse texture with normal map, the gun is built into the character as it's not for playing, it's just for looping that one animation (although if it needed to be turned into a game character, I'd just remove it).

Anyhow, crazy times lately here at GG, but it's been really awesome. Enjoy, sorry I forgot!

Youtube Link
WMV Link

Tim A

Art blog

Timothy Aste — 2007-03-02T19:51:21+00:00

Been awhile since I've done a blog post on here, so figured I'd throw up a quick art blog.

First though,in case you missed it, GGE has gone live for the general public, be sure to check it out at www.greatgamesexperiment.com. Congrats to the team on going live, it's an awesome site.

So some people picked up on the shots of a character I was working on in my spare time around here (not a lot of time for art in the last six months). About two months ago we had a power-surge here at GG due to old wiring kicking out the power (too many computers on this side of the building). When the power came back on, all the machines came on at once and poof, fried my two external hard-drives which were stupidly not on a power-surge strip. Lots of stuff lost on those, but one of the things was the character demo from GameFest. I think Mark McCoy actually has a copy somewhere, but it was a rush job anyway so I figured I'd spend a little time hooking up the dude I was working on in the same situation. So anyway, hooked him up, still have to tweak the animation a bit to not be a little wonky, but it runs.

So since it was rather painless to get it up and running for GDC, I figured it'd be fun to just run with it and make a quick little environment to show it off in, to show off the new lighting stuff as well. One of those rare moments where things just gel quick (did it pretty much all yesterday) so I ended up coming up with this "Gold Forge" setting yesterday (mostly because I wanted to play with dramatic lighting and glowing meshes). I think what I dig most is that it's a pretty dynamic environment, everything has some sort of movement, etc. Was a ton of fun, and still have some stuff to do, but for the most part it's going to wind down. Still on my list is to actually put some texture on the dude's back, he used to have a backpack, but due to time constraints for GDC I just took it off because I didn't think I'd have time to properly texture it all, even thought the normal map stuff was done awhile ago (I'm slow with character stuff, not my primary area of
expertise). Gotta touch up some of the textures, thinking of throwing some decal light projectors in there of some veiny looking stuff as light/shadows, maybe throw some floating stuff in the water, etc. Got a really nasty bug in there that freezes the scene, probably because I'm built this in a hacked up orbit camera directory and there angry going on. Got some script problems with particles too, again just seems to be in this hacked up demo script version I'm using. Nothing that can't get fixed today though with any luck, will bug someone to figure out why it randomly freezes up on me.

Other than that, we got some cool stuff to show off at GDC this year, everything from Torque X, TGEA, TGE, Games, GGE, TGB, and the list goes on. I don't think we have enough booth space to show off all the cool stuff properly actually. I'll be down at GDC, busy worker bee again, so if anyone will be at the IGDA, Minna Mingle, or XNA evening events, please feel free to say "hi"! Sickhead Games will have some cool TGEA stuff to show off very soon too, but want to save that little juicy
tidbit for them to show. ;)

Obligatory pictures and movie following:

www.garagegames2.com/web/images/tima/plan/forge.wmv

Products, Holidays, Job Opening, GGE Winners!

Timothy Aste — 2007-01-04T21:20:47+00:00

It's .plan time again. Hope everyone had a great new year!

First off, I'd like to announce the winners of the GGE Contest:

In addition, each user has their choice of a free copy of either TGE 1.5, Minigolf Mania, TGB, or Tim Aste CP #2 (your choice) to the 1st place winners of each contest.

Congrats to the winners of the GGE contest. We are shipping you a box of goodies. We changed the contest a bit due to unforeseen overlap in the winners(a few people winning all categories multiple times) so we ended up just awarding a blanket grand prize to everyone who had an awesome profile, or submitted the most quality games in a category. Therefore many of the following won for their profile, the games submitted and general awesomeness.

Thanks and congrats!

Secondly, we should keep seeing a ton of new games, content packs, and other tools into 2007, with several product launches lined up for the Winter. Keep and eye out for Constructor and TGEA, the gnomes tell me they may be almost upon us.

Next up, I'd like to announce some job openings here at GarageGames. This job description maybe updated, so please check for the latest information on our Jobs Page.

PHP Web Developer

Based in Eugene, OR GarageGames is a 7 year old established bootstrap video game developer in the process of building a video game oriented community site (www.greatgamesexperiment.com), and are looking to expand the team of maintaining our company website (www.garagegames.com).

GarageGames is composed of extremely talented and creative people who make video games, video game related products, and video game middle-ware with no outside pressure, corporate shallowness, or grind-house motivation techniques. We make the games we want to play, develop the technology we would want to use and we work on our own terms. We are very close-knit and unique culture of hard working, creative and highly motivated people.

Unlike other companies, at GarageGames you are part of a team, a partner in development. At GarageGames, in addition to a base-salary and benefits we give all developers a royalty-like bonus and an internal royalty on projects they work on. Our mission is to provide independent developers with tools, knowledge, co-conspirators; everything needed to make great games.

We give game makers the opportunity to publish their games, find their audiences, and perhaps make their fortunes.

Job Description

LAMP Web Developer - PHP, Object Oriented, MySQL, Apache, Linux

Are you passionate about gaming and the communities that grow around it? If you are an expert at developing high-performance interactive web applications using Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP, we want to talk to you!

We are now actively looking to hire some really motivated LAMP Web Developers that are passionate about developing community driven websites. We are looking for candidates that want to work for a medium sized video game and technology oriented company. Multiple positions available.

Skills Required

LAMP Web Developer, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux, AJAX, XHTML, Javascript who is aware of scalability and optimization of web applications.

Must Have Skills:

1.) 3+ years of hand on professional experience developing PHP web applications. Candidates must have PHP4 (we work with 4) and MySQL 5 experience.

2.) Bachelors in Computer Science, Information Systems a plus.

3.) Applicants with vast, professional portfolio will be given top consideration. Show us your past projects.

4.) JavaScript, XHTML, and CSS skills are a must

Nice to have skills:

1.) Apache

2.) System Administration on Linux

3.) XML, RSS, AJAX.

This is an exciting, creative and uniquely intense environment! For your hard work, you will be rewarded with an offer that will include a solid base salary, a comprehensive benefits package, paid time off, a great and fun working environment, and other cool perks! Interviews are starting this week and will be continuing until a proper candidate is found.

Please send a resume and portfolio with cover letter to:

Timothy Aste
GarageGames, Inc.
245 West 5th Avenue
Eugene, OR 97401
FAX: 541-484-7476
tima@garagegames.com

Lastly, GG is back in action after the holidays, but we had some good times at our Christmas party. In case you don't check the employee page that often, we've had some new faces join the Garage in the past six months. Anyhow, GG welcomes Michael Blenden, Thomas Buscaglia, Joshua Dallman, Jacob Fike, Channa Langley, Trevor Lanz, Dylan Romero, and James Wiley to the team. These guys are kicking butt. Here's some quick photos from the Christmas party (no this isn't IGC, but might of been just as big).

Joe's daughter Anya.

She knows how to break it down.

Josh manages to look angry in every photo somehow (this is probably costing him money).

Brian Ramage was one of the DJs that entertained.

Quite a big crowd gathered! Eric Hartman in the foreground.

People are starting to show up and lose the programmer daze.

Not quite sure what is happening on the right, but I know it involves a Nintendo Wii.

Davey Jackson Allison Tunnell battle it out in Guitar Hero II.

Part of the musical setup for entertaining.

Pat Wilson also provided entertainment for the masses as a DJ.

Everytime I came back this seemed tobe refilled!

Dylan Romero practices his Zombie for motion capture.

The food was rotating and full of awesome.

Eric Fritz, Michael Blenden and Jonathon Tunnell enjoy the Wii.

Michael, Channa and Jonathon did a great job on the building entrance.

Gifts!!

Good times and Good company.

Heidi Tunnell catering, awesome food.

Jeff & Allison Tunnell

Nate Feyma enjoying sandwich, grooving, and Wii dangeously all at once.

Pat Wilson

Paul Scott and his arch nemesis in an epic battle.

Top Down View

Top Down View

Jeff & Josh being secretive.

Cool shirts!

Skylight room decorations, I don't see these going away.

Amazingly, 3 people fit where 1 Tim Aste does. They are chatting about how I have too much stuff probably.

These were quite loud.

Jeff giving someone the business.

Pre-destruction

GGE Contest Extension!

Timothy Aste — 2006-12-12T20:42:10+00:00

Hey everyone, in hindsight, we should of allowed more time for the GGE contest to run! That said, the contest, which it's details can be found here:

http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/32699/11812
http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/32699/11812

Will now run until 11:59pm on January 1st, 2007! On January 2nd, we'll be tallying the stats, contacting the winners and packaging up the schwag and gift packages.

Keep submitting games and sending out beta invites to the Great Games Experiment! We have tons of cool stuff coming every day, and are working on the site to make it the pinnacle of awesome.

Win even more Free Stuff

Timothy Aste — 2006-12-07T23:44:04+00:00

So is this spam yet? I can't emphasize enough how much filling out GGE is for the indie developer and how important it is for everyone to get involved. Seeing how my .plan got bumped off the site in 8 hours (wow can you say this site is getting big?) I'm reposting with a link to the contest info:

http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/32699/11800

Win good stuff for sitting at your computer and writing about games you love. :)

No strings attached.

If that wasn't enough, we are updating the prize list! We are giving out a free copy of either TGE 1.5, Minigolf Mania, TGB, or Tim Aste CP #2 (your choice) to the 1st place winners of each contest.

Check out the details here.

Great Games Experiment Contest

Timothy Aste — 2006-12-07T01:14:21+00:00

The Great Games Experiment

This is the best part of my job, giving away stuff. It's wicked fun. GarageGames is giving away tons of little freebies just in time for the Xmas season. This is a very informal "contest", just open to our friends and family, site users, and people working the Great Games Experiment. As a developer, the great games experiment is one of the most important things to happen for you in a long time. I can't be more serious about this.

If GGE takes off, this will level the playing field for all developers. Jeff Tunnell is planning to write more about this in depth so I won't steal the thunder, but we are already hearing stories very early in beta from developers who are telling us that because they have been promoting their games on GGE they have been selling a lot more games, just by simply making game profiles. We are seeing gamers flock to this site, even this early, and they are finding games that are like the games they play, games they have never heard of, and making friends who like similar games. Seriously, if we can keep this going, in a few months this will be one of the most powerful tools available to all game makers, whether it's someone in a garage, or a giant studio.

We have big plans for GGE and our web development guys are cranking on it every day and doing some incredible web 2.0 stuff. So how do you get involved? Pretty easy. Word of mouth, tell other games, tell other developers, put links on your website, use the gamer tags, talk about it on your blogs, and most importantly, we really want our friends and family to get involved and fill out parts of the site before we move onto the next stage. GGE is very intimate right now. We have thousands of requests coming in everyday for beta access, but we are scaling up in a controlled environment and only a few hundred are currently allowed in until we have tried and tested our infrastructure.

To help this along, we are giving away "GG Prize Packages". Here are the competitions:

Most Quality Games Submitted.

We are watching who is submitting games and eventually the site will get to the point where it will be hard to submit games that don't already exist. We want more games now though! We are giving away prizes to the people who submit the most quality games. This means filling out the page correct, making sure it has a box shot, screenshots, and more. Shell pages with no content don't help anyone know more about the game! We are making it easier and easier everyday to add more games, and right now, we really hope people add quality game pages! The day we are checking to see how many games are submitted will be December 18th.

Best Profile

On December 18th, we will also be checking out a variety of profiles to see who has the best looking profile (that isn't a GG employee). This means we will be looking at who has the most quality content, best looking design, best Avatar, etc. There isn't a hard definition of what makes a good profile, just make it good! We'll be sure to look at everyone that's up, but if you don't even have an Avatar, we might skip over you. :)

The prize packages for the below contests are the same, minus the GG jackets and IGC 04 T-Shirts (we only have 2 of each):

Most Flash Games Submitted.

To whoever submits the most flash games to the site, with quality pages for each game (reviews, descriptions, box shot, etc), we will be awarding the prizes according to the list below.

Most AAA Games Submitted.

To whoever submits the most AAA and Mainstream games to the site, with quality pages for each game (reviews, descriptions, box shot, screenshot, features list, etc), we will be awarding the prizes according to the list below.

Most Indie Games Submitted.

To whoever submits the most Indie and Non-Mainstream games to the site, with quality pages for each game (reviews, descriptions, box shot, screenshot, features list, etc), we will be awarding the prizes according to the list below.

GG Jacket, only a few left in existence!
GG Green collared shirt, also on their way out. We are switching our tshirt set next year.
GG Padfolio, stamped with the GG logo and Torque Logo.
Old GG Pen (old design that is)
New GG Pen (much easier to use)
Game Programmer's Guide to Torque
3D Game Programming all in One
GarageGames Mousepad
A stack of 100 Legions Temporary Tattoos
GG Branded Notepad
IGC 04 Tshirt
Pat Wilson Tshirt
Rack 'Em Up Roadtrip Tshirt
Zap Tshirt
GarageGames Coffee Mug
2 GG Buttons
GarageGames Hat
Ultra Rare Marble Blast Ultra Hat

For Second Place:

GG Green collared shirt, also on their way out. We are switching our tshirt set next year.
GG Padfolio, stamped with the GG logo and Torque Logo.
Old GG Pen (old design that is)
New GG Pen (much easier to use)
GarageGames Mousepad
A stack of 100 Legions Temporary Tattoos
GG Branded Notepad
Rack 'Em Up Road trip Tshirt
Zap Tshirt
2 GG Buttons
GarageGames Hat

For Third Place:

Old GG Pen (old design that is)
GarageGames Mousepad
A stack of 100 Legions Temporary Tattoos
2 GG Buttons
GarageGames Hat

If that wasn't enough, we are updating the prize list! We are giving out a free copy of either TGE 1.5, Minigolf Mania, TGB, or Tim Aste CP #2 (your choice) to the 1st place winners of each contest.

So hopefully this is a fun little thing and I hope as many participate as possible! We have much more exciting stuff coming in the future (gift certificates, video cards, a private tour of Tim Aste).

We have much bigger and more expensive contents planned for launch down the line, but this is something we are keeping "in the family" with our limited beta. Here are some pictures of the schwag we have to give away, and Sales Associate Michael Blenden modeling the GG Green Collared T-shirt for us:

Just look at all those stocking stuffers.

Other than that, we are always cranking on stuff here at GG. The holidays have arrived so the GG crew is getting all trussed up and getting ready to take some time off to visit families and friends (except Ben Garney, you are not allowed to leave). Channa Langley, our great office manager (whose been helping me out quite a bit lately with the Intern program) has done a great job on the front entrance, and the Skylight room guys got some craziness going on:

Monday is the launch of XNA Game Studio Express (and maybe Torque X?), so if your up in the Redmond / Kirkland area, be sure to stop by the Microsoft Campus and enjoy the XNA open-house.

We have AFX almost ready and should be out any day now, for those of you who have been waiting quite awhile.

We also have several other packs & tools coming down the line very soon for sale here at GG, such as FX Pack#2, L3DT with Atlas Export, PD Particles, Matt Sayre's huge Audio pack, and many more.

Our latest release, FX Pack #1 by Games Extract is simply put: awesome. Check it out, no action game should be without this product. :)

Additionally, if you haven't been following the Games Store recently, it's worth checking out. Josh Dallman has been populating it like crazy with actual games, a first for the website in a long time. :)

New releases include Kachinko, Phantasia, Ultimate Duck Hunting, and Minigolf Mania!

I'm sure I'm probably forgetting something to pack into this plan, but I guess this will do for now. I'm not in marketing so I don't get paid to write this much, and I'm not very good at it. So remember people, use those beta invites, take some time to spruce up your profiles, and submit games and all the sudden you might find a big box of G embroidered stuff on your doorstep.

TGE 1.5 & New Products

Timothy Aste — 2006-10-12T22:24:45+00:00

Torque 1.5

Another week, more stuff here at GG. Ken, Matt, Paul, Ben & Joe have been hard at work squashing those last few bugs in 1.5 that cropped their heads. On the presentation side, things are still coming along very well. Below are some shots of the new Starter.FPS example, which inclues awesome sound work by new associate Jon Jorajuria of Dark Combat Audio and has art assets from Todd Picken's RTS Environment Pack included.

Several pieces of the winter environment of Todd's RTS Environment Pack are now included with TGE 1.5 to further add value to TGE 1.5

Additionally, new GG Intern Joshua Dallman of Red Thumb Games has donated four new high-quality skyboxes to Torque 1.5 as Starter Content. Be sure to send these guys your thanks!

Additionally, we have some new products coming down the pipe rather soon that I'd figured I'd mention. Some are known, some aren't.

Overlord
Overlord is an awesome web-based team management tool at a great price which is a great help to small indie teams and mod makers. We were so impressed with the work Jacob Fike had done on Overlord that we hired him on as an employee to become the third member of our internal web development team, and are putting Overlord up to be published here exclusively on GarageGames.com, look for it to be available soon.

Games Extract Car Pack
Adam deGrandis is back at it again with this really awesome & flexible Games Extract Car Pack. The pack includes a car mesh with nine different textures, 5 levels of detail, environmental mapping, a wheel mesh, working brakelights, and all the scripts to allow you to drop it into your game. Also included is the source in .max and .3ds format for the geometry and .psd format for the textures, as well as detailed documentation featuring how to get the Car into your game. And as a special bonus, a custom racetrack environment, complete with new terrain textures, a new skybox, and race track road pieces which you can use in your own projects. It's definitely whammy bar quality stuff, available soon.

L3DT
Aaron Torpy of Bundysoft has a great tool out there for terrain management, it's been immensely popular with the TorqueAT community, and it was only natural for us to get with Aaron to offer this great tool to the community directly. We've taken it one step further however and L3DT Professional will be available on GarageGames.com very soon with some bonus features. Aaron and Ben Garney have been busily working away on adding Direct to TorqueAT exporting into L3DT via a plugin. So when L3DT Professional ships here on GarageGames, you'll be able to create your huge Atlas terrains directly in L3DT's awesome editor, and be able to bring it straight into Atlas & TorqueAT with no hassle. This is really awesome stuff.

Arcane FX
Faust Logic's ArcaneFX Tool for TGE is going to be ready soon for publishing, post TGE 1.5 launch. Arcane FX brings powerful spellcasting and particle animation tools and content to TGE in the likes of what is seen in World of Warcraft and beyond. Anyone whose been lucky enough to try to Beta agrees that ArcaneFX is one of the hottest things to come to TGE in a long time and is "freaking sweet". Read more about it on Jeff Faust's most recent blog entry.

We had an informal community weekend this past weekend for our Associates and anyone who had already purchased a plane ticket to Eugene for IGC already or an IGC ticket. From what I hear, it was a huge blast and we had a bit larger attendance than we planned from what I hear (don't tell our building manager!) and some of our guys are still recovering. Unfortunately, I missed out due to unexpected last minute complications and was 3000 miles away the one weekend everyone was in town, however I really hope to see you guys all out finally next year. :)

More Torque 1.5 Hype - Kork has a friend

Timothy Aste — 2006-09-21T02:37:26+00:00

Say hello to the TGE Elf. Also, a shot of the new main gui in the works, marketing guys have yet to finalize all the names of stuff.

Hype hype hype....it's getting close. :)

More Torque 1.5 Shots

Timothy Aste — 2006-09-13T22:09:15+00:00

Orc Town 1.5

From this morning's build, special thanks to Todd Picken's for Donating 2 high quality foliage textures form his latest FPS Environment Pack. If you like these two, be sure to check out the whole pack, it rocks.

Be sure to check out the changelog Matt Fairfax put up.

Edit: Quick Video, sorry this is all I could do, gotta get back to work on this thing! (This is just what's done so far).