Blog for Jason "tekanoid" Hubbard at GarageGames.com

A slight shift to the two-dimensional

Jason "tekanoid" Hubbard — 2006-10-07T15:03:53+00:00

Well, our progress has become somewhat...stagnant. It's not really for lack of trying, though. We're both very busy, and we have little time to actually work on any of our projects. Donald's got some things going on the side, so to speak, and I'm trying to get a new position at work.

In other news, I picked up the demo for TGB and plan on buying the indie license shortly. I'm really impressed with the tutorials that came with it. They're very thorough and they do a much better job of explaining themselves than the tutorial from TGE. Not only that, but so far, they appear to be almost completely error-free, which is good for those of us still learning. Anyhow, I'm really liking the interface for TGB and the ease of use. D and I have come up with a couple of 2D ideas that should have a much shorter development cycle. As much as we'd love to work on our 3D projects, all the advice we're getting is to start small. Very small.

Also, we got to attend Jay Moore's party "thing" last month when he was in town for the Austin Game Conference. Donald, being the busybody that he is, was smiling, shaking hands, and collecting business cards. Me, being the shadowy silent partner that I am, stood in corners, talked to few, and took impromptu self-guided tours of the hotel. They have a nice restaurant on the top floor. I had met Jay at the Texas Independent Game Conference back in July, but he didn't remember, and so I met him again. I can't really blame him, though. In his line of work, I'm sure he meets a ton of people, and as I told D, "You're a 6'8" black man. You're hard to forget. I'm a sub-6-ft chubby white guy with a goatee. Nobody remembers me because I look like half the guys in the industry." (No offense intended, of course. :) )

Lastly, I came up with what I believe is a much better (read: fantastically cooler) setting/storyline for our main 3D project. I still need to flesh it out, but I'm really excited about it. I don't know yet if we're going to use it for anything or not, but I love coming up with new storyline ideas anyway. I can't count the number of ideas I've had over the years that I thought would make good games, stories, or even movies. I guess everybody has those, though.

Hopefully in my next post I can include some of that storyline info, or maybe even some screenshots from one of our projects.

TX Indie Game Con

Jason "tekanoid" Hubbard — 2006-07-23T14:00:02+00:00

Well, Donald beat me to it, but this is my post about the Texas Independent Gaming Conference that I attended yesterday. It's actually still going on today, but unfortunately I have to work today. Donald pretty much covered the highlights, and all in all it was a very enjoyable experience. I will refrain from making too many comments about one of the speakers that I listened to yesterday, except to say that his presentation was utterly horrible, and I'm not sure, but I think he might be a hack. If it adds to my critique, I should say that about half the audience walked out during the presentation. Aside from that talk, though, the conference was good.

Rock on, Texas indie game scene.

Filling in the gaps a bit...

Jason "tekanoid" Hubbard — 2006-07-09T19:59:48+00:00

So I wanted to put something down as far as some kind of progress meter for this project that Donald and I are working on.

No one in this community really knows me, but I've pretty much been Donald's "silent" partner for about the last 10 months. I have some background in programming, but sadly my professional career has been almost 100% tech support. That being said, though, I consider myself an avid PC gamer (with some occasional console time), and I've been playing games since the early 80s. I first started on Apple IIe and IIc systems, then got a Commodore 64 at home, then went to PCs and never looked back. I actually started writing my first game when I was about 12. It was a text adventure along the lines of Infocom's Enchanter and Zork titles. It never really saw the light of day, unfortunately, but I certainly had fun trying. It's only been in the last year or so that I've really rekindled my interest in actually making games.

Now that the brief history lesson is over, if I had to sum up our progress in one word, I'm afraid that word would inevitably be: slow. It bothers me sometimes that we're barely moving, but at least I still feel like we are moving. We have a concept artist and a 3D artist now, so that's got the gears going a little bit. Our 3D artist tends to have more free time than the rest of us, so he's hungry for more concept art and the OK to model what we approve. I picked up The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque at B&N the other day (sorry Donald, that was the only copy they had), and I'm really trying to dive into it.

I work a 4-day, 10-hour-per-day week with 3 consecutive days off, and I really hoped to make some progress on our game, but I ended up trying to play catch-up and relearn what I knew about TGE so far. (I just finished a C# class, and I had started getting confused between Torque and C#, so I dropped Torque for a while.) It was really disappointing, but then, realistically, my approach to this has been like somebody trying to "jump right in" on a quantum physics career. It's just not that simple. I keep putting aside the books in favor of trying to toy with the code, then I just get annoyed when it doesn't do what I want.

I'm now taking a few steps back and going over the basics yet again. If anything, it's a refresher, but I'm already liking the style of Maurina's book more than that of the 3DGPAiO book. Ultimately, I think both with be very useful, even if just for reference, but I think TGPGtT will be a more informative "cover to cover" read.

All in all, this post is just to say that progress is slow, but it's progress nonetheless. We're still focused, and our friends and families are very supportive of our efforts. We've got our domain set up with SVN and some private forums where we can have all our ideas written down. (Now if I can only get Donald to actually post there....)

Thanks for reading, and go Torque your heart out. (ew?)