Blog for Marc Schaerer at GarageGames.com

New Editor for TGEA

Marc Schaerer — 2007-10-03T14:15:28+00:00

It has been quite some time since my last blog post and quite a lot has happened.

The most important point is that I am now part of a team that uses TGEA for its games.
TGEA is quite interesting and powerfull technology but we soon struggled over the part that the editor does not meet the capabilities of TGEA with stuff beeing visible not working and things working not beeing doable through the editor.

For that reason, I've currently redesigning the editor from ground up to allow it to be more powerfull and more consistent than it currently is.
I plan to do this on a such modular base that it would be possible to give out the editor to others as well when it is finished.

Part of this rewrite is:

- Cleanup and Fix of broken and inexistant WE and TE features.
- Add more features to the TE like the possibility to access all 4x 4 textures usable on legacy for example.
- Integration of the light editor into a similar structure.
- Implementation of a full featured Particle
- Implementation of a Material Editor with realtime preview
- Redoing the UI editor. Got poisoned by the TGB one which lets the TGEA UI editor look like a stone age toy

The editor will be using a more context sensitive approach than the original one which just floods the menu etc with useless stuff.

If there are things you always thought that should be there and aren't or things that should perhaps work different, let me know here. Perhaps you have a point I haven't thought of yet.

Its getting somewhere :)

Marc Schaerer — 2007-01-08T15:50:50+00:00

After doing extensive tests on how the control sheme should work and would work in the most intuitive way (target: mouse only), I've come up with a 2 button mouse sheme which works quite good.
To allow attacks which are more than hitting a single button and thus a strategic combat, it uses a pseudo gesture system (pseudo gesture because it uses a 9 zone check, where the player itself is in the middle = zone 5). This gesture system works quite well so far and I hope that it will stay as intuitive and simple as it currently is. (moving for example is simply clicking into a specific zone which makes your angel move until you release the button, dash is pulling from 5 to left / right with pressed left mouse button until you release the button etc)

After I've finished this part, I plan to implement a material system for different ground materials and their physical influence on the players angel. (I'm not using TGB physics for that as my Rigid tests so far didn't work out as hoped so using own simple formulas for friction etc is easier to get it going).
There are at least rock, grass, water, sand and ice, which I plan to add. If I can come up with other interesting materials, I'll add them as well. But I think this already gives quite interesting combinations for battle arenas.

PS: When I've graphics I'll add some screens to show the game, most likely with a beta or the game itself as download. I'm not that good in graphics, so this will most likely take a fair amount of time until it is happening.

First steps - once again

Marc Schaerer — 2007-01-03T07:01:48+00:00

After quite some time (TGB 1.0) of "inactivity" on TGB, I've decided to come back and do my current project with it.

It will be a full mouse driven, manga inspired game which is sort of in the fighting genre.
Sort of because it is not reflex based as most games in this genre, but more strategic, as it was inspired by angelic layer and some other mangas.

Hopefully I'll soon have more to tell and perhaps show off.