Blog for Tom Eastman (Eastbeast314) at GarageGames.com

TorqueX 3D Beta Fun

Tom Eastman (Eastbeast314) — 2008-03-08T18:29:56+00:00

My, it's been a long time since my last .plan. However, to make up for that awfully common start, I've gots lots of images!

So, here we go. Started this little project a few weeks ago as a final assignment. Here it is in it's completely awful starting stage.

Then, at Milestone 1 - I had to have all the gameplay in. It's a simple racing game - collect the crates for points, run (and later shoot) into the enemy to kill them. Splitscreen multiplayer (thank goodness the Gamefest demo did this).

The initial texture pass - you can barely tell I'm not an artist and had no time ;) The Crazybump beta was invaluable for stopping everything from looking bad.
The daisy vehicle is perhaps the most hideous thing I've ever made.

The second level I made was a kitchen level - driving around on the floor is always fun...right? Ended up being way too hard to tell it was a kitchen, but whatever - time and I have a strained relationship.

And the final level with some baked lighting from 3ds Max (with some wonderful UV unwrapping artifacts). Didn't have time to really look, but most likely there's a difference in the way Max shows vs. exports UVs to dts.

And, the best part of the game: the goal crate. A little mix of the lovable companion cube, a golden coin, a cow, and cake.

And, just for kicks, one of the images rendered from a raytracer I wrote this term.

So, there you go. Big thanks to John Kanalakis for answering questions (of other people) in the TorqueX forums - saved me a ton of time across the board. And, also to the team that put together the Gamefest FPS demo (and the whole beta) - the comments in the engine were very helpful.

And now, time to dream about the rendering equation :)

GDC from afar (w TGB scripts!)

Tom Eastman (Eastbeast314) — 2007-03-17T03:20:31+00:00

As all my worshipping fans know, I'm now contracting for GG - doing TGB stuff that no one else will do. Actually, it's more like I get to do the fun stuff while the real devs slave away over font rendering ;)

So, when Justin let me know that they needed to turn a bunch of assets into a game in 8 hours for some GDC thing, I was glad to accept...

It was a few minutes later that I remembered that I would be doing it during midterms, but that only makes life more exciting!

Here's the Session Description:

Quote:
Casual Game Technology Face Off - Chris Melissinos (Sun); Justin Everett-Church (Adobe); Brad Edelman (PlayFirst); James Smith (Reflexive Entertainment); Josh Williams (GarageGames); Jeff Weinstein (PopCap).
Over the last few years, platforms like Flash, Java and Director have matured and new platforms like the Torque Game Builder have emerged. At the same time, C++ programmers have many new frameworks to choose from including PlayFirst's PlayGround SDK and the PopCap Framework. This panel of technologists tells you why their platform or
framework rules the roost, and bring a demo to prove it. Each panelist has used the same art assets and game design to build their own version a casual brick busting game developed in their platform of choice.

So, with a .zip of a few million .pngs, a design doc, and the passion that only procrastinating college students can posses, I dove into creating Ricochet Extremely Cloned in 8 hours.

However, I was barely prepared...for how incredibly easy it would be to do in TGB.

You can read the download the design journal and scripts here or keep reading my rant about it. Or do both - ain't hyperlinks a blast?

Note
The assets from Ricochet are released under the Creative Commons license (full version here and in the downloadable archives)

I'd never timed myself doing a project like this, so I had very little idea how long it would take to throw a game together. However, it was soon apparent that with a clear design document, a strong understanding of TGB (especially its quirks), and an empty dorm room that I could do it in less than 8 hours.

The design journal in the download goes over the little details of what went right and my decision process, but here are the key points that made TGB a blast to use:

>LevelBuilder - this was the first game that I actually used the Level Builder as, well, a tool for building levels. Using the (completely magical) defaultConfig to apply a datablock to the animations in the Create Tab, I could build levels using only drag-and-drop, which just kinda sorta makes it too easy. Along with the align/distribute tools, those bricks had no chance. And, to top it off, I got sequential level loading to work without any major problems.

>Default collision options - At first, I was very wary of whether the physics would work or not - but it turned out to not be a problem at all. Perhaps it was because I'd had to play with them before, but I figured out all the physics parameters (send/receive stuff, response types) on paper before hand - and it all worked beautifully out of the box. The design doc even specified that they only wanted a simplified ball/paddle interaction (and even gave a formula for it), but in TGB it was as easy as setting the ball's direction to the opposite of the collision normal. Makes me wonder why I'm taking so much math...

>Particles! - Once I had the game finishy, I asked Justin and Joe to take a look - and they decided it needed more polish. I had about an hour and half left at this point, so Justin suggested I set up a whole bunch of placeholder particle effects and then Alex could make some effects... I already knew that particles are awesome in general and that Alex is too - but I somehow forgot the combinatorial property of awesome. Download the scripts and
get the fireBall powerup. Next, close your mouth and add some sweet particles to everything in your TGB game ;)

>Performance - When we found out what kind of computer the demo would run on at GDC, at least someone (me) was worried. I mean, integrated graphics, man... So, GG got a craptastic laptop and gave it a run on that. The game wasn't running over 200 fps like it was on my laptop, but it was still holding at a substantial fraction of that - even with a ton of particles, animations, and physics all over the place. Effect/animation recycling systems are fun to write and make things nice and smooth - check out the code for the simple ones (but don't make the same mistake as me and encourage massive allocation of effects when there are none to recycle - namely, making explosive bricks accessible from the beginning of a level ;)

So, head over here,
download the goods, and give it a whirl! There are lots of nice snippets in there that will answer some common forum posts and the scripting isn't terrible either ;)

Also, you can check out all the Casual Games Summit Presentations here and all the other Ricochet EC demos in this .zip here. (The other versions' design journals are great - made me really feel bad for the other guys, especially the Java dude)

A wee bit of coverage can be found here and here if you're interested.

Have a Torquetastically good time with it! A HUGE thanks to Joe for always answering my constant emails and helping with the journal, to Justin for fixing the audio stuff in the beta of TGB (that's awesome) that I was using, and to Alex for making the demo go from a by-the-book clone to a demonstration of TGB's spectacular particle system.

Internship Complete (Press Start)

Tom Eastman (Eastbeast314) — 2006-12-13T17:14:46+00:00

Well, today is the last of my internship at GG. It's been over three months since I hopped on a plane in Philly and landed in Eugene, completely independent for the first time in my life. It's not a big jump from dorm life, but it's still different (mainly not having a dining hall). I'm going to use this .plan to ramble on about my decision to intern at GG, the crazy experiences I had here, and my plans for the future.

The Boring Part

For most of my life, I've known what I wanted to do with the rest of it. Make games. And although being a game developer isn't up there with dreaming to become an astronaut (yet), there were tons of doubts along the way. I made a decision to take every opportunity I could find and work harder at it than anything else. That choice led to me to Garage Games, but not until after 2 com plete (free and bad) games (one of which prompter Larry Niven to threaten legal action), 4+ commercial Flash games (which are on Discovery's Cosmeo site), an educational TV show script, and 4 internships. One of those games got me into an awesome college, too. All because I decided I was going to try my best and see what happens. I've been thinking a lot about all the 'follow your dreams' advice kids get - and I think a lot of people take 'follow' the wrong way. You don't follow the leader to your dreams, you live the dream until it's real.

The Fun Part

On my first day in Eugene, I wondered where the city was. Philadelphia is a city. Eugene is an overgrown suburb. It's awesome. However, being an overgrown suburb (and a college town, to boot) means that nothing makes sense. It took me almost an hour to figure out that when Tim Aste said the intern housing was at number 1863, that actually meant 1825. Or maybe that was just the first test for interns.

I soon got to meet the awesome people who wrote the blogs I'd been reading for the last few years. I found out quickly that Joe Maruschak is even cooler in person, Justin DuJardin is not (as his profile pic suggests) grayscale and yells a lot (occasionally at me but usually at inanimate objects, deadlines, or kittens), Davey Jackson can talk trash like a retired garbage collector, Matthew Langley is somehow immune to documationitis [sic], ... - actually, I found out that everyone at GG is harder working and cooler than I had imagined. I could go on and on about most of them, but that would be weird and they might not let me come back.

So, what did I do for three months? Well, I started by learning everyone's preferences for coffee and lunch. Then, each morning at 5AM, I'd get up and prepare everything. I'd be done by about 1, when I'd set up the banquet in the warehouse and ring the bell.

Actually, I got to work on some awesome stuff. Joe started me off doing all the TGB tutorials and taking notes (what is this? school?). It was actually fun, since I hadn't done them all and I got to make bug reports. I reported a lot, thinking I'd be helping make the docs better and save people from making the same mistakes as me. Little did I know that I'd later be fixing all those bugs and writing pages upon pages of new and revised docs for TGB 1.1.3 ;) After doing all the tutorials (they were still .pdfs at this point, so editing wasn't going to happen until Commander Langley had worked his magic on them), I was tasked with cloning a flash game - probably to see if I was competent or not. I ended up making multiple versions: basic, blingy (with the wave-propagation hinted at in my last blog), and multiplayer. The basic version will probably be released (with scripts!) sometime in the future.

The next big thing I worked on was for a Microsoft Press Event a few months ago. I probably can't discuss it, but it's awesome. I got to demo it a few times at Boot Camps (thanks Stephen Zepp!) and I know it'll make everyone even more excited about TGB. For this project, I got to work with the famous (at least to this MB player) Alex Swanson. I'd made a mockup of the project (using random art from all over) before being asked to make a full-fledged demo with Alex. I very quickly learned the value of artists. Having done everything on my own before, I was utterly unprepared for the shock of seeing both elegant code and beautiful, iconic art on the same screen ;) (Note: by elegant, I mean ugly, hacky, and shameful - but it was my first non-school pseudo-crunch, so it looked alright when I was up late the day before it had to be finished and bug-free.)

When that was done, I was thrown back into the documentation cage. Someone realized that Matthew Langley couldn't possibly write new docs and finish the new doc framework in such short order. (Actually, he probably could have - the documentation system was getting so complex that another week might have seen it become self-aware and start adding docs to itself) I wrote most of the Component Tutorials, added a ton of functions to TGB Reference, and fixed lots of oddities in the tutorials. Oh, and I indented every single code block in the docs by hand. *shudder* That period was usually managed solely by listening to hilarious banter in the room. The most memorable time involved Mark, Joe, Spider, and Justin discussing nuts and boxes for at least a few hours. It took me a while to figure out that they were talking about the UI for the textObject in the LevelBuilder.

Since the release of 1.1.3, I've been playing with TorqueX and polishing up some things that will be released sometime soon (hopefully). There's always lots of awesome in the tubes!

The Future

Although I decided to go back and hopefully finish school, I'm going to help out as much as I can from there and will surely be back in Eugene before too long. It wouldn't surprise me if Adam Larson was making TGBX so cool just so that I'd fail all my classes and have to come back and be forced to make games all day ;)

I've never seen some many awesome people in one place and I can't wait to see them all again. To anyone considering applying to intern, DO IT (even if you have to make flash games all summer to make enough money).

Despite the risk of sounding like a fanboy, Garage Games is ridiculously awesome. Thanks to everyone I got to meet and work with!

And, to the TGB forums - I hope I was somewhat helpful! I learned a lot from trying to answer every question. I'll still hang around over there - someday I'll be as knowledgable as GuyBrush Buscaglia and Ben R. Vesco...

Interning Unlimited

Tom Eastman (Eastbeast314) — 2006-10-03T03:08:09+00:00

Hello various nefarious Torquers!

I've been interning at GG for a month now (wow that went fast) and, despite my personal goal of blogging more than once a month, have managed not to shed some light on the internship program. Some of you probably recognize me from the TGB forums, where I spend the day pondering the role of sprites in the world.

Being on the other side of the NDA is both a blessing and a curse. I get to see how hard the employees are actually working (I wish they were lazy and would play MBU with me) and what exactly they are working so hard on. Some of the stuff is downright spectacular, but alas, I am cursed into silence. Now that I think about it, Tim was probably too busy to see that I had actually signed the NDA... Drat! Anyway, so think twice before you question these guys - they're working harder than the ants in Antz (and it shows - I beat Davey more than once at MBU! He needs to play more, a lot more). It's easy to doubt the company or engines when you can't see the individuals working hard everyday.

So, when I got there, they threw me onto the Wheel of Death, which everyone else calls QA'ing the TGB tutorials. Not to steal Matt or Joe's respective thunders, but the docs are going to be much, much better for TGB sometime in the future. I helped a bit with the tutorials. Instead of frowning at a tutorial mistake, I could actually fix it. Wonder of wonders! After reporting a ton of bugs and then being told to fix them, Joe gave me the task to clone a 2D game, make a tutorial, and then add 15 or so pounds of bling to it. Click here to see a pound of said bling: Click me! (.mov) So, I got to write a wave propagation system! You can't really see any of the waves in the movie, just what I call the activation nudging, so you'll have to wait to see the whole thing! Mwuhahahaha!

Yeah...so anyway. Perhaps some of you are aware that GG has the ONLY games industry internship program that I know of. That's basically really cool. I'd recommend it to everyone, but that might hurt my chances of coming back for another round before college is over. So, just remember that some of the employees prefer coffee on gold platters while others prefer silver. It's up to you to figure out which are which!

I've been working on something else that's so top secret that I'm not even allowed to think about it outside the offices. So, I can't tell you what it is. But I might be able to tell you that it will rock your socks (or does that give it away?).

Happy Torqueing and maybe I'll hint at random things sometime next month!

Intro and Inspiration

Tom Eastman (Eastbeast314) — 2006-06-04T01:48:01+00:00

Hello!
Hello GG community! I'm going to introduce myself in this .plan/blog, talk about what I've done with games so far, and hopefully inspire all the other youngin's like me to get moving! This may end up being boring (another person who wants to join the industry...for a reason!) but the pictures ought to help that a bit. Edit: or, since I don't know how to scale them down here, just go to my lacking website to see them: www.pixelvalley.net/EasTech.htm

Introduction
My name's Tom Eastman (Eastbeast314 on the web - I was under 18 when I made this profile) and I'm a rising sophomore at Dartmouth College. My interest in games started in fourth grade when I watched a friend play Warcraft I, way back in fourth grade. I decided then that I wanted to make games (along with being an astronaut and pro soccer player). Looks like that dream might actually come true because I'm going to be interning at GG this fall!

Past Work
My development experience started at nehe.gamedev.net/, learning OpenGL and C++ nice and slowly. My freshman year of high school, I made my first 'complete' game:

Shape E-vaders This game used the height of my game-making skills: it was object oriented (one object...the shape class) and it had textures! The only thing of note was that it was a complete game. Menus, high scores, mouse support. I wrote everything myself, and although it pains me now to look at the code or the graphics, it is still fun for a bit and can keep young kids entertained.

Rings Wars
Having finished Shape E-vaders in less than a few months, I began work on my next game during finals of freshman year. My plan was to make a top-down tank local multiplayer game with powerups that used a whole bunch of classes. I wrote the core game in a few days (always my favorite part of development - somewhat unfortunately). Over the rest of high school, I'd go through phases of hard work, bug fixing, integrating new OpenGL tidbits, and making tools. The game ended up pretty far from my initial (basic) vision, but still gots lots of play time in my school. As I learned new graphics tricks (like blending!), I'd add them (some would say "tacked them on"), only making the code uglier. In addition, when I finally decided to make the game 3D and third person, I wrote an entire .ASE importer and class to load models I made it 3ds Max. However, when I wanted to add animation to the models, I ran into the very scary fact that .ase outputs every vertex ever x frames. Multiple megabyte text files aren't so awesome, especially since a low value of x results in terrible looking rotation.

So, I used maxscript to write a rigid-body key frame animation exporter that works with the .ase data to make models move with seperate animations stored in one file with the model data. Took me a long time, but I learned a ton (quaternions, anyone?). That loader was probably the hardest thing I've written and the mostrewarding. Not sure if I'd recommend writing such a complicated system without even understanding pointers.

Eventually, I finished Ring Wars (after renaming it from Ringworld Arena because Larry Niven wasn't a fan) and wrote my college essay about its creation. Despite the fact that I gave up on selling it online and that the code should never be seen with human eyes, I still am proud of it. I made a complete product, all by myself, learned far more than I did during a year of high school, and did it while I was young enough to have the time. The games mentioned here (and some other stuff) can be downloaded from my website: www.pixelvalley.net/EasTech.htm

Money!
During the past two summers, I interned at Fabian-Baber, Inc. I was contracted to make a supplemental game to go along with an educational video they had made for Discovery, Inc. The video was about the ancient Mayan base 20 math system, so I planned out a game based on exploring a temple to collect tablets. Every door had to be opened by solving a math problem and every level had to be completed by matching up our modern numbers with the Mayan numbers. The game had to be made in a few months, so I ended up cutting a few features (like attacking animals). Nevertheless, it was a fun game, I got to work with a professional animator, made some money, and (shock!) I learned a lot. The game couldn't have been that bad, because Discovery bought the rights to the game last year.

Future
Now that I've been accepted into the GG internship program, I'm going to be working with Torque over the summer, making a few prototype games to get used to the engine. I've been reading plans here for a few years and think I have a good feel for the community. I'll work even harder at GG knowing how much the community cares (especially since I'm already crazy to do an unpaid internship. I haven't decided whether to learn TGB or TGE this summer (perhaps Tim will give me a hint what I'll be doing if he reads this), but I can't wait to dive in once school is done for the summer.

After college, my dream is to find a job at a dev studio and get to work on games as a programmer or designer.

Speak Up
The real goal of this huge self-call was to make it clear to all the kids/teens who visit this site to read the .plans/blogs (I'm not the only one, right?) that it is totally possible to make a game. It's a lot of work, it absolutely sucks at times (I had a ton of fun with a bug that made half my Ring Wars objects dissapear at random times), but it's completely worth it in the end. Games have gotten me 5 internships now, into college, and given me a direction to head which many of my peers haven't yet found. Perhaps this is a sign of changing perceptions towards games (although Dartmouth profs still have to refer to games as "interactive real-time simulations" to get funding) or perhaps I just got lucky.

So, to anyone who reads this and thinks "I could do that!," you definitely can! I wouldn't recommend doing everything from scratch (I couldn't believe how easy GUI's are to make in Java when I took my first CS class at Dartmouth). Instead, from what I've seen of TGB, I think there's finally a great product that lets people make games as long as they meet one requirement: they are determined to do so. I'm continually stunned at what GG is offering (and for so cheap!). I think that user-created content is a step in the right direction and user-created games are even better!

Hopefully I will serve the community well at GG. I'm planning to blog during the internship (about what I can) in the hopes that it will encourage others to find the joy of game development that I've found.

If you actually made it this far, thanks! Check out my website (download the games discussed here) and read my research paper about Halo. www.pixelvalley.net/EasTech.htm You can email me at gamedevATdartmouthDOTedu. I'd love to share ideas, code, or recommend resources. Game on!