Blog for Clint S. Brewer at GarageGames.com

Snowing and Skating in the Music Lounge: ho ho ho

Clint S. Brewer — 2006-12-22T22:13:50+00:00

Tis the Season in The Music Lounge

The Lounge has been wonderfully crazy lately, we've gone from average of maybe 20 people on a day, to 80, 90 and more than 100 players regularly.

Feels like a different place, but good. All of the different areas are finally filling in with people. Come check it out if you haven't in a while and let me know what you think.

We did a mad rush to get some fun extra things into the lounge, we turned on Christmas decorations and an ice rink the other day, then just turned on the snow today. ( Thanks to the weather resource and tge 1.5 example!)

Santa and Elf costumes, antlers, new dj sets and lots of new features in place.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanuka, and good tidings for Whatever you celebrate!

now if only I get that wii I want for Christmas....

Halloween in The Music Lounge

Clint S. Brewer — 2006-10-31T03:47:19+00:00

on the UnEarthed Games side of things:

not much news. I've been itching to do some artwork lately, so decided to practice with this building

It's time to get the whip out on myself and get back in gear with some regular milestones. I've fallen into basically not planning my progress at all with UnEarthed Gods, and the amount of progress I make is markedly less than when I planned out every week.

On the Doppelganger side of things....

Muahahahah,

We've had a fun few days lately over Halloween in The Music Lounge

Here's a video: The Funk of 40,000 Years!
I thought I had already posted that video here, guess I just emailed it, so time for a new full .plan post.

This was all relatively last minute. A few weeks ago we decided we should spend a day or so getting something special for halloween together. Well that day turned into a whole lot of effort put towards some Halloween fun which is always good!

We have
* Special Halloween DJ Sets (including some stuff I haven't heard in ages, like Nightmare on My Street )
* Zombie Infection game with various Zombie/ Ghost forms (TGE Cloaking ++ )
* Linda Blaire Head Spinning (custom animation blending code)
* Costumes
* Special Decorations we can turn on and off (show & hide everything in a simgroup)
* Bloody Footprints (dynamic tge footprints )
* Fan Chats with various Pussy Cat Dolls
* Multiple Dance Competitions with judge Kimberly
* Staff Dance Competitions (using alpha unreleased dance script maker)
* oh and sound effects, my personal favorite. You scream bloody murder every time you jump
** doors scream and howl, knives chop, squishy stuff squishes,
* lightning strike with various full screen color shifts
* and I'm sure other stuff I'm not thinking of.
** oh yes screaming severed heads you can throw that spews blood
** and a laughing pumpkin you can throw around ( <-- RigidShape )

all of this can be turned on and off while the server is running.

We've been running the zombie game on and off and collecting high score info for prizes.

Here's some pics over the weekend and today...

PussycatDolls 100s of people in TGE

Clint S. Brewer — 2006-10-08T18:15:04+00:00

quick post,
we are doing a live event today on the PCD Music Lounge,
The Pussycat dolls are doing a video shoot, and hopping on to chat with fans today and tomorrow.

If you want to see what it's like with 100s of people running in a server at once install and log on :)
PussyCat Dolls Music Lounge

check out my last plan for more info and screenshots on the lounge

edit: updated link, thanks Stefan

The Music Lounge Beta5: eye candy: cyclic changes: DJ Dance Groove

Clint S. Brewer — 2006-09-13T19:36:31+00:00

I'm intending this to be a quick post. I've sort of avoided posting for a while, way too long. Thing have changed a lot for me in the past 6 or 7 months.

I'd like your help and feedback on our new beta we released at Doppelganger, eye candy and links below

here's the quick story of the past months:

- UnEarthed Games going strong, but looking at how it's taken so long motivation started declining

- Initial self set deadline of two years before reevaluating whether I can continue full time was impending

- Savings getting low, so I started doing some contract work

- worked with some fellow garagegamers doing first contracts and really appreciate the work, learned alot about organizing contracts making it clear what is to be done etc

- met the Doppelganger people through Orion Elenzil, and we all got along great, you might remember this snapshot Orion posted back in june

- did some extended dedicated contracting with them adding toon rendering to tge and helping artists with various pipeline things

- moved to Santa Barbara, closer to wife's family

- did another couple months dedicated contract work with Doppelganger

- realized exactly how much I loved working with people again. I have been working for all intents and purposes solo for the past two years

- the time was ripe, the people were ripe(I mean this in the best way possible :) ), the feeling was ripe and I joined them full time a few months ago

Where now UnEearthed Games?
UEG is pseudo on hold. Letting this go unfinished is not an option for me. I plan to continue working on it in a strictly part time manner for the forsee-able future, and most likely bring in some other people to help finish. Most of the game is there, it just all has to be finished, and finishing is going to be a lot of work. More about this later.

Right now the thing I'm really excited about is The Music Lounge and what's going on at Doppelganger.
short cut to the chase: You can go and register/try out the demo here

Please try it out, I'd love to see what happens when streams of garagegamers log onto our server :)

We've done some stress testing pushing it pretty high but nothing beats real people trying it.

This is a screenshot from a live event we had with Kimberly from the Pussycat Dolls talking to fans. Notice the shiny water, this is an adaptation of Manoel's wonderful water contribution (I can't thank you enough for that which you gave freely) I adapted it for use with cgfx, and changed the way it's set up a bit, added some fallbacks that use static cubemaps etc, but the core is the same.

This next one is a sort of birds eye view of the front of the club, and some hottubs on top

This is a disco party on top of the world

looking through multilayerd alpha quads....triiiiipy

when we were developing things, I spent way to much time trying to jump around and get to places the artists didn't really intend me to get to, a sort of slow moving digital parkour, at least thats the way I thought of it :) When we went public, players quickly figured out how to get to even more places using teamwork, it was awesome..

Hmm I could keep talking about this for a long time, I might edit and add more here.

Please check out the new Beta 5 and let me know what you think. We've done a lot with TGE but as you know there is so much more we can do.

Here is the beta link again.

think hard....there is no quick post

Tuesday Oct 18 18:37

Clint S. Brewer — 2005-10-18T18:37:03+00:00

Working on AI, game plot, game play, audio and doing a little contract work on the side. Lest my silence deceive you, the game is coming along very nicely!

I put up a new DevDiary at UnEarthed Games this week, talking about what I've been up to lately.

Quote:

I've been quietly hammering away in my workshop for the past couple months.

Working on AI, game plot, game play, audio and doing a little contract work on the side. Lest my silence deceive you, the game is coming along very nicely!

* Screenshots
* Artificial Smarts
* The Plot Thickens
* Contracting UnEarthed Games
* Farewell for now

Friday Aug 19 19:38

Clint S. Brewer — 2005-08-19T19:38:09+00:00

Discussing Save and Load with SimGroups and ScriptObjects

I just posted a new devdiary at UnEarthed Games

Quote:

Save and Load for Torque Aug 19, 05:28 PM

At Nick Zafiris' prompting I'm going to talk about how I'm handling save and load for UnEarthed Gods and some of the troubles that assailed me along the way.

A while ago, I posted in the private GarageGames forums here talking about ways to handle saving and loading in TGE (Torque Game Engine). For those of you without access worry not, I'll give the jist of everything there in this devdiary. With much help from Tom Bampton and others I was able to get a working system in place....

...Continue Reading...

-clint

Wednesday Aug 3 20:42

Clint S. Brewer — 2005-08-03T20:42:05+00:00

UnEarthed Games devdiary, thoughts on making tge dev easier for single player game makers

There's a new devdiary at UnEarthed Games talking about my experience making a game in a day the weekend before last.

Work is going along heavily with UnEarthed Gods. Revamped dialog system and new conversation editor, new spells, better saving and loading, improved ai, and the game arc is coming into place. I'll be talking more about these in the next couple weeks.

if you haven't seen them before, there are screenshots of UnEarthed Gods here.

I've been working with TGE 1.3 since about December of last year, now about eight months, and it feels great to finally be comfortable working with it. There really is a lot there to be used; quite a few things have made my game development easier. Thinking back over this time, there's a couple things that would have made it even easier:

1. Ability to link any object to any node / bone. This was something I had to add that I use all the time. Linking lights to things, linking emitters and triggers to things etc. Once this is done, the weapon system could be rewritten to make them a shapebase type of object linked to the players mount point with special handling, instead of the special shape base image object that is owned by the player, making it difficult to get to in any sort of generic way.

2. A single player game starting point with save and load. It was a good learning experience to make this change myself, but development on the game could have gone more quickly if there was a good clean single player mod starting point from the beginning. I realize that save and load can be very game specific, but there is core functionality that would be simple to provide an example of use. I think this would help new developers who might want to use TGE for a single player game.

3. Ability to easily bypass networking code. It's great that the networking code is there and it opens up new possibilities, like a possible co-op mode for UnEarthed Gods, but, for me, it added a lot to the learning curve and made it much slower to do any engine modifications. I realize this is central to Torque, and could not easily be changed, but I think it's worth noting that it hampered my single player game development and learning TGE.

4. A generic AI system that makes it easy to add different types of AI with different behavior. Personally I love working on artificial intelligence code, so didn't mind getting the chance to do this myself. Never the less, I think it would be a great help to new developers if it was already there.

I think that if some of these changes could be made, it would make development easier for a good number of people and possibly we would see more single player TGE / TSE games.

Thursday Jul 21 20:15

Clint S. Brewer — 2005-07-21T20:15:56+00:00

I've been working heavily on the magic system for UnEarthed Gods this week....

I've been working heavily on the magic system for UnEarthed Gods this week. It's extremely satisfying to finally get some of the core gameplay stuff working that I designed a while ago. I know I should have prototyped this stuff earlier, but I'm finally to the point with all the backbone of the game in place, and a certain level of mastery over the scripting system and engine, that I can get these ideas done quickly the way I want.

I'm a beginner when it comes to designing gameplay, and this week's work lead me to a realization about gameplay and automation.

-----------------------------
mirrored from devdiary at UnEarthed Games.

Let the Player Make the Decision Jul 21

As some of my gameplay ideas come into reality I'm realizing some things just don't work as I thought they would. I started doing some things automatically. For instance, if you try to use a healing spell, but are already at full health, then I don't cast the spell.

The thought of this seemed nice to me. If I don't need to use that magical energy then don't use it. Thanks game.

But in practice it feels like the game is making decisions for me, holding my hand. Decisions like this need to be left up to the player. This gives us (the players) a chance to learn about the world and a chance to make a decision. Which is part of the fun of the whole thing.

This type of problem becomes apparent as soon as you play the game, but there can be a lot of time between the fleshing out of gameplay ideas and the actual prototype test of the idea.

The trick is realizing when something is an interesting decision the player should make, and when something is just a tedious task that should be automated.
-------------------------

-clint

Monday Jul 18 7:33

Clint S. Brewer — 2005-07-18T07:33:03+00:00

2 New UnEarthed Gods Screenshots, what's been going on in June/July at UnEarthed Games

There's a new DevDiary over at UnEarthed Games talking about what I've been up to lately. There's a couple new screenshots inside.

I'd like to mirror it here, but the formatting in bringing it over is too time consuming, If you comment here instead of the UnEarthed Games site I'll definitely see it.

Quote:

[image]www.unea...

This past month has seen many revisitations both in life and in game development (as if the two were separate!). I've got so much to talk about, it's as though this were a mini devdiary in the larger meta devdiary that normally exists. Consider this 13 separate devdiary entries. It's so BIG it gets its own table of contents:

* Inspiration from Strange Places
* Animations and Skeletons
* Making a Torch Come to Life
* Attachment Code, Linking to Muzzle, Unifying Varied Code
* Inventory UI: Who Needs All Those Icons Anyway?
* Gamma Adjustment
* Physical Properties for Materials
* Critical Hits
* Making Some New Music
* Sound FX
* Fun With Inventory
* UnEarthed Games Website
* Sim's Dev Journal

Monday Jun 13 22:50

Clint S. Brewer — 2005-06-13T22:50:05+00:00

New UnEarthed Gods devdiary, new screenshot of cavern

( a screenshot of the evolving cavern system in UnEarthed Gods )

I just posted a new devdiary over at UnEarthed Games talking about the fruits of my TGE graphics programming labors last week.

Giving into graphics programming desires was a good thing:
I fixed the code for dynamic lights inside interiors (and have a resource that's awaiting approval)
I made interior environment mapping use proper lighting from lightmaps and dynamic lights.
I added initial support for resource managed shaders.
I worked a lot more with the dif modeling tools so my art will be better in the future.
I learned a good deal about different parts of the engine that I don't normally touch.

It's time to get back to more core game play and art work this week. It's nice to have new things available, and it's always nice to understand this behemoth of an engine better.

with the dif modeling tools I've run into I think all of the major problems. I'm looking forward to a newer version of map2dif.

Some of the 'rules' I'm learning are 1: don't rotate things, mirror them left, right, up, down, cut them with the clip plane, but don't rotate them. Following this rule seems to keep me away from the bad winding errors. at least so far it has.