Blog for Deborah Marshall at GarageGames.com

Yard Sale Junkie coming to a portal near you!

Deborah Marshall — 2008-05-13T20:47:57+00:00

Although there are certainly a wide variety of personalities here in the GG community, we do share a common trait. No, it's not that we love Fridays (although many of us do), but that we all love great games and we want to make ones of our own.

Because I am the librarian of all things Torque, I am in the fortunate position to be one of the first people to hear our community's success stories. For instance, last week, Eyal Erez of Sudden Games used TGB to publish his first casual game called Yard Sale Junkie on Reflexive Arcade, where it's currently getting a lot of love and attention. In the spirit of sharing his success with the rest of you, I conducted an e-mail interview with him about his experiences developing Yard Sale Junkie. Below are his replies. Enjoy!

Click to see a video of Yard Sale Junkie

1. Obvious question: What is your game?

"Yard Sale Junkie" is a variation of the hidden object genre with a time management twist.

2. What makes your game unique?

* Usually hidden object games have a static background image in which you need to find a list of objects. YSJ features a dynamic background in which every object can be moved around from place to place. The feature makes the player look for objects that are hiding behind other objects.
* The list of objects you need to find is also dynamic and works on a timer. Instead of a static list there are customers that are looking for items in a yard sale. If you don't get them the item in time, they leave and a new customer arrives looking for a different item.
* Some of the small items (watches, rings, earrings, etc) are located on boards in which you need to zoom into these boards to find the items and zoom back in order to find other items in the yard sale.
* Some items are sold in pairs (shoes, gloves, speakers, rollerblades, etc). You have to find both items and pair them together before selling them to the customer.
* There is a matching element in the game. Some of the jewelry is inside jewelry boxes. In order to see what's inside the box you need to click on it. This makes for a fun memory game since you need to remember which box has the jewelry you are looking for.

3. Where did your inspiration come from?

The inspiration came from watching my fiance playing hidden object games. The movable objects idea came from her laughing about me not being able to find anything in our house that is located behind something else. Apparently, men in general suffer from the same syndrome?

4. What was your development process like? Do you follow any strict principles or methods (SCRUM, etc.)?

Since I was the only programmer on this project, I didn't. Originally I only wanted to do a prototype to quickly figure out if the gameplay would work. I kept adding up features to see if they would be fun and ended up with a game.

5. What appealed to you about Torque? Did you consider other technologies?

I did look at other available tools and even tested some of them. I started the project using C++ and SDL since I wanted to make it multiplatform. When I realized that TGB supports all platforms including Wii and Xbox, I decided to at least prototype with it. However, once I started using it there was no way I would go back to C++. It was just way too easy to finish the game in Torque. The scripting language was as easy to learn as python so I picked it up fairly quickly. And the graphical level editor is definitely one of the biggest advantages. When I was done writing all the features, I was able to design 2-3 levels a day, just dragging and dropping the items into the level. I wrote an automated sorting mechanism to place the items into layers based on fake perspective distance from the camera.

6. How many people worked on the game team? How did you work together?

I did the programming, level design, sound and GUI. I hired several freelance artists for the music and 2d artwork which includes the comics, GUI artwork and characters.

7. What were a few major development challenges you encountered? How did you overcome them?

There wasn't really any major challenge, just a ton of minor questions which are engine related. Fortunately, one of the main strengths of GarageGames products is the community. When I encountered a problem, I would post a question in the forum and move on to progress on something else. In a matter of hours, I would receive several responses to my problems usually with a few different workarounds or solutions. It really felt like you are working with a big team. This made a huge difference for me. Now that I'm familiar with Torquescript I hardly run into any problems.

8. How long did it take to create the game?

Three months of full time work, and full time meaning working your life away. Of course, this time included learning a new language.

9. How did you test your game prior to release?

I sent it to everyone I know and asked them to play it and fill a feedback form with related questions. I also wrote a script that spits out important data that I needed like how long it took to finish every level and what kind of score the player received. When I could, I would look at people playing while taking notes. You definitely get the best feedback from watching someone else play the game.

10. Did you come away from the project with any lessons for the next one?

Definitely! I knew exactly the type of game I wanted to write so I jumped right in and started coding in a language I wasn't familiar with. I should have done more tutorials and learn Torquescript better.

11. What's next? Can we expect to see more development on this game or will you move right on to a new project?

Well... Definitely I'd like to capitalize on TGB's code once feature and make a Mac version. And I do have many ideas for a sequel so definitely starting a new project. This next one should be much easier, although I probably shouldn't say that?

Congrats again, Eyal, and hope to see more of your work in the near future!

Survey Says ... TGEA 1.7

Deborah Marshall — 2008-04-18T23:40:28+00:00

Collecting information can be a tricky thing, especially with a community this large and diverse, but with your help and these fancy interwebs, we can try to learn all that's necessary to make smarter decisions. I don't want to imagine how I'd get this kind of info without it. Southpark painted a scary picture for me though. Back when I was a kid, I remember my father and me paying $3.95 per minute on the Sierra phone hotline to solve a particularly challenging puzzle in Conquests of Camelot. Now, if my sister tells me a ridiculous story about an elephant being able to paint pictures, I can verify her story pretty quickly.

With the TGEA 1.7 release we asked you guys for some help and suggestions. We've received a lot of information in the form of blog discussions and other on-line posts. We also asked you to take a survey about your thoughts on TGEA and 3D game engines in general. This is really important to us because we want to provide you with solid technology to make awesome games.

While we're already hard at work on our next release, there are plenty of open questions and we have a lot of ideas of what to do with TGEA, thanks to your feedback. In the interest of keeping the dialogue open, I want to share some preliminary survey results, as of April 18, 2008. All the charts are shown with the percentage response as well as the number of people who replied in that category. Of course, we know the survey has bias and is not the end-all of where we want TGEA to go, but it's good to get a little feedback on the feedback we received from y'all! ^_^

What do you want in a 3D game engine?

This is what you guys said want in a 3D game engine. As you can see, source code available, easy-to-use editors, smooth art pipeline, and extensive documentation were the most valued by users who participated in the survey. People are torn on whether they want to create games for the Mac, with almost a 50/50 split between caring a lot about Mac games and not caring at all. People seem to care least about actual development on a Mac. Some other things that people cared about not mentioned on this list were an affordable price, frequent updates, starter kits, and a good physics system.

How do you feel about TGEA?

After knowing how people felt about game engines in general, we wanted to know how TGEA ranked. The above chart shows all the responses we received, regardless of TGEA version number. TGEA's main strengths lie mainly in the community, which is no surprise to us. TGEA also scored high on PolySoup Collision, MegaTerrains, and multiplayer support. We scored just "all right" on our art pipeline and support, as well as the newly released Forge demo. We also received a flood of comments about TGEA, so here's a small subset I'd like to share, completely unedited in original form:

"The docs were nice but it didn't go into detail about mega-terrains. I would like to see a better physics implementation with a nice user friendly gui some day and same for particles."
"I used TGEA for a prototype. I think that there were many things that may be improved like importing custom shaders and how easy to use they were. I see that many features have been solved in TGEA 1.7 but havent tested them yet."
"It can be difficult for newcomers to the engine to pick up. Tutorials would be of immense benefit."
"TSE was a huge disappointment. The lack of OpenGL, and the poor performance of the engine made me consider it unusable, so I stayed with TGE. TGEA1.7 is the first release that I've seriously considered using for development again. I'm hoping that this trend continues."

How do you think the TGEA 1.7 betas went?

Of all the data gathered, nothing is quite as clear as the chart above. You guys obviously loved the TGEA 1.7 beta process and we loved it too because your input helped us make a more solid release. Some other comments you made on the beta process:

"I thought it was the best release of a Torque product. Just the smashing of the nasty bugs that put a bad taste in buyers mouths when the final is released and they are still there, was a great feeling. Having the community involved was really nice, because you were able to see the process of what was going wrong, and everyone actively fixing the bugs, rather than you wondering if a bug was actively being worked on (getting fixed)."
"The open development, fast communication and updates make this an example of how it should be done. Great job."
"For a short while there, it felt like we were back in 2002-3 when the GG community was really active. In my opinion, that community is 50% of the engine(s)."

So what does this all mean?

We're still figuring that question out. We know some of the directions you guys want us to go:

"I hope you guys continue to make GAMES, and not just develop tools, because I think that is the best asset for making a good engine. When Marble Blast Ultra was the only GG game running on TGEA progress was slow, but just having you guys working on Legions helped us as a community know that problems we might run into making a FPS game would be addressed because you guys would run into it first in testing. So I guess I'm saying whenever you are going to make a new big release for an engine, it would be nice to work on a demo of something, internally, that would really push the engine in the way that buyers would want to (like FPS, RTS, RPGs, the norms)."
"I want some kind of editor to make 3d games with 2d gameplay (for example, placing "3d tiles" in an editor and having them automatically aligned, having an isometric view camera, having optimized organization and rendering for that)."
"TDN Docs should be compiled together and made available offline. Spidering software for offline archiving does not work well with the TDN."
"I think you guys do great stuff. Since we need mac support we stuck with tge 1.52 and now could not change even if we wanted, too much custom code. I'd just love it if the new tgea terrain or at least its texture size would be ported to tge, thats the only thing sorely in need of a better look."

We have our own ideas about TGEA, ranging from improved documentation to specific features. I'm hoping in the comments that follow, you can expand on some of these results and keep giving your two cents. So type away. We are listening. We want to keep an open dialogue. We'll struggle some if we try to please everyone, but the more feedback we get from you, the better decisions we can make for the future of Torque engines.

And for you slackers out there, if you haven't already, take the survey. We have 160 responses so far, but I would be thrilled to have 1,600. Let you voice be heard and we'll do our best to keep Torque rockin'. ^_^

GDC, TGB, You and Me

Deborah Marshall — 2008-03-21T16:35:03+00:00

Okay, so it's been a month since GDC, but I have to admit that I'm still recovering. The deluge of e-mails that follow such a huge gathering of developers is always a bit overwhelming. I got back to my desk on February 25th, looked down at my gi-normous pile of business cards, and didn't even know where to start. It was invaluable meeting so many Torque owners. I talked about every subject imaginable: what's cool about Torque, what sucks about Torque, casual games, WiiWare and XBLA games, you name it, I discussed it. It was awesome to meet so many of you and I hope to continue passing notes back and forth as you finish projects. (Hint: I love prototypes, alphas, betas, and all sorts of early versions of games! Send them my way! ^_^)

It really is true that you learn something new every day, but that goes triple for every day spent at GDC. For someone like me who is supposed to be an expert on what's going on with Torque, it's amazing to discover just what I don't know. Because it would be impossible for me to discuss everything, I'm going to limit myself to Torque Game Builder-related topics. But for those of you who ninja'ed other information on Torque out there, feel free to reply to my blog and let the world know.

Interesting TGB Tidbit #1: GarageGames has no idea how many games have been made with TGB.

It's embarrassing, but true. I've been trying really hard in the past few months to compile a list of everything made with Torque, and I felt pretty good walking into GDC. It's not so bad having your bubble burst for such a good reason. Here are two games I discovered at GDC that you might find interesting:

Creative Kingdom's Bubble Warrior: A fun side-scroller game where you play characters from the popular Thai cartoon of the same name. The game is still in active development and should have more playable characters soon. I ended up chatting with two guys from Creative Kingdom about their use of TGB to make Bubble Warrior. They are planning on making more commercially-licensed games for Thailand TV using TGB. I'm looking forward to seeing what they cook up next.

Thai studio Creative Kingdom lights up with Bubble Warrior

Eric Robinson's Kanji Kami: If you're interested in learning Japanese, like I am, than Kanji Kami is for you. Players take on the role of Matsuo Basho as they collect kanji characters with targetted radicals. Not only is the game beautifully stylized, it also promotes learning kanji in a much more accessible way than strict memorization. Eric Robinson, the guy who created Kanji Kami, and I ended up talking quite a bit in the booth. We found out that we both taught English in Japan on the same program, and that we both ended up using our time abroad to pursue our true passions: he made this game, and I wrote a novel.

Learn Japanese with poet Basho in Kanji Kami

Because of GDC, I've added about a dozen or so projects to the Powered by Torque list, and I'm adding to it all the time. If you notice anything missing on the list, please e-mail me and I'll add it on, ASAP.

Interesting TGB Tidbit #2: Platformers are the gateway drug into 2D game dev.

At GDC, there is a good mix of new and experienced game developers running around. Because part of my mission at GDC was to find interns for GarageGames, I ended up talking to a lot to aspiring game developers. There was an overwhelming number of students who choose 2D in order to make platformers. In fact, we got a little flack because so many students wanted to make a platformer, but the current TGB documentation and tutorials have very little support for that type of game.

I can hear Phillip O'Shea doing a happy dance right now because he just released the TGB Platformer Kit on the GarageGames site. Honestly, he couldn't have been working on this project at a better time. Here's another example of one of our awesome community members filling a need before we even saw it. Thanks a bunch, Phillip!

A Demon smiles with large bottom teeth in the TGB Platformer Kit

Interesting TGB Tidbit #3: There's a ton of TGB documentation if you know where to look.

Probably the most valuable thing I observed at GDC was the different way people liked to play around with our game engines. After watching people for two days, I saw a few patterns emerge and wrote down all the different ways people had tried to learn TGB for the first time. I was able to try out my new list on the last day in the booth, when one college professor approached me and wanted to know how he could learn TGB not only for himself, but also to teach his students. Here are the different places I told him he could start:

1. Go through the official TGB tutorials: You can find them by going to the "Help" drop down menu in TGB, clicking on "Documentation," and clicking on "Behavior Tutorials" and "Tutorials" in the left drop-down menu. Depending on what game you want to make, you can go through each tutorial in order, or you can pick and choose which ones are most appropriate to your game. These documents are available even if you are off-line.

Expandable lists make it easy to access official TGB Tutorials
2. Check out the TGB tutorials on TDN: Besides the official docs listed above, we also have a great page of tutorials you can find on the Torque Developer's Network, our community-managed wiki. HUGE props go out to Mike Lilligreen for largely taking over the maintenance of this part of TDN. To give you an example of this guy's work, he ported over GarageGames's Rainy Day Tutorial to TDN within 24 hours of Derek Bronson posting it. Lightning fast!

In the spirit of helping people learn tutorials, I also took a few hours and made this video version of the Rainy Day Tutorial. Feel free to check it out and give me feedback on whether it's useful to you!

Mike Lilligreen, we salute you on TDN's TGB page
3. Tinker around on the Behavior Playground Demo: For those people who have programming experience, I suggest modifying the Behavior Playground Demo that comes with TGB. Behaviors are little bits of functionality you can assign to an object, and they make TGB easier to use because you can simply assign script files to different objects to make them behave in a similar manner. To open the Behavior Playground, go to the place where you installed TGB, then click on the following path: Games > Behavior Playground > project.t2dProj. The script files for all the behaviors in the demo are under the "Behaviors" folder, so once you want to figure out how something works in TorqueScript, you can easily find its script file in the folder.

So many objects to play with in the Playground
4. Make a friend on our community forums: The above three suggestions will get you pretty far, but you'll need help at some point. That's where our community comes in. If you don't own TGB, you can access free user forums to ask questions as you use trial version of TGB. Once you own TGB, you can access a more comprehensive forum community.

You've got questions? The TGB forum guys have answers

Ultimately, I'm grateful I had the chance to meet so many of you at GDC. For those of you that couldn't make it, feel free to drop me a line (deborahm AT garagegames DOT com) and start an on-line conversation with me. I'm not going to know what's on your mind unless you talk to me. And as great as GDC is, it's just not feasible to meet everyone at any one event. I hope you stick around and add your name to this list of people who are proud to use TGB to make their own games. And stay tuned as we have more in store for this great 2D engine.

Game in a Day: GG Style!

Deborah Marshall — 2008-01-31T01:28:49+00:00

We know you love making games, if this list is any indication. It's been pretty exciting to see our community get involved with self-started game creation contests, Inspired by all of you, a handful of GarageGames employees decided to run on our own Game in a Day competition. If you're wondering whether we've been ignoring Torque development or the Instant Action beta as we've created our masterpieces, don't worry. Like you, all participating GarageGames employees had to finish their Game in a Day projects off the clock. We tried create an environment that was similar to yours so we could use the experience to make future versions of Torque better.

Some Background

We unofficially started the contest on Tuesday, January 22nd by splitting into three teams of four people each. We chose TGB as the dev weapon of choice, since there were members in each team who had only light scripting experience. Before the weekend, teams could only work on game design, art, and hardware set-up. Reusing code from previous game projects was deemed okay. Then, all participants gathered on Saturday, January 26th at 11 am, and we coded, animated, and gave each other flack well past sunset. Teams were allowed to work Sunday to put the finishing polish on their games, and finally today the three teams met to brag and boast as we showcased our games to each other. In the spirit of Game in a Day, we didn't declare a winner because creating a game is its own reward. (*ahhhhhhh*) Of course, that didn't stop each team from personally declaring itself the winner, but hey, it's good to have pride in one's work, right?

Why didn't we wrap up on Monday? Well, for those of you who've been to Eugene, you know that it doesn't snow often, and when it does, it stops the town. We all worked from home on Monday.

The snowy view from Dan's apartment
So without further ado, here are the teams and their projects:

Garage Quest Ultra Blast

Team Members: Dan Maruschak, Eric Fritz, Michael Blenden, and Deborah Marshall

Game Description: Remember those classic point 'n' click adventure games, like Sierra's King's Quest? This is our warped version of it. Play as Michael Blenden, a real-life "Garage wanderer," in his quest to go home at the end of the workday. When his boss, Karen Peal, asks him to find Brett's expense report before going home, the real fun begins. Michael will have to use deodorizing orange spray to maneuver past the stinky bathroom, find the QA department in an alternate dimension, and rescue a member of the executive team before he will be able to escape the building with his life (and dignity) intact.

Note: The game still has some bugs in it. (It's a prototype, all right?) So make sure you 1) ONLY click on the floor areas and on people and 2) when a conversation starts, don't click on anything and let the conversation play out naturally.

Fritz needs some respite from a noisy co-worker
Development Process and Challenges: The team batted around several game ideas, including a fighting game, but ultimately decided that keeping the game funny and personal would be the most fun. Because the team had only had one experienced programmer, Dan Maruschak, we wanted to keep the game concept simple, and it doesn't get much simpler than point 'n' click adventures. (And even that had its challenges!) The majority of the team spent its time taking pictures and creating static and animated sprites for all the players, objects, and backgrounds for our game.

One scene came from a lot of photographs

Scope creep was the biggest problem with our game. We wanted to add a lot of game functionality at the beginning - including a big 2D style fighting game at the end and more sound support - but Dan spent most of his Saturday just getting the speech bubbles to work properly. A lot of our "want to have" features were cut in the interest of time, although we hope to add them in later. (Does this sound familiar to any of you?) Most of our challenges were just lots and lots of miscellaneous tasks (like getting scene transitions to work right), and they all added up. It's a lot easier to appreciate the work required for big tasks, while the little tasks are easy to dismiss as trivial things that won't take any time. Finally, because of bad snowy weather on Sunday, we couldn't meet together to finish our game as originally planned, and Dan did a lot of the smaller tasks that he was going to teach the rest of us to do because it would have been difficult to explain how to do them over the phone.

Overall, we're pretty proud of Garage Quest Ultra Blast, and we hope you enjoy it too!

Download GarageQuest Ultra Blast here!

Josh Adventure

Team Members: Matt Langley, Channa Langley, Derek Bronson, and Davey Jackson (Mr. Ed)

Game Descriptiont: In Josh Adventure, you play GarageGames CEO, Josh Williams on his perilous quest to launch InstantAction.com. In this "Stealth RPG" you'll have to navigate the GarageGames offices to meet with department heads, while trying to avoid long side conversations with your well intentioned employees. In the spirit of Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, and Metal Gear Solid, you'll have to move from point to point trying to avoid your employees' cone of vision. If you get spotted, you'll enter a "combat" scene where you'll have to simultaneously decrease your employee's "Interest" in talking with you, while maintaining their "Morale." Loosing too much of an employee's morale will give you a "Stress point." If you gain 3 or more stress points, you're off to the funny farm instead of the IA Launch Party.

Josh vs. Davey

You've got to be stealthy to get around the office

Development Process and Challenges: The main challenge we faced for this game was enemy AI. Initially, we wanted to do a Pac Man style chase through the GG offices where the employees chased you in real time. However, for game in a day, we didn't want to spend all of our time on AI pathfinding, so we opted instead to give the employees patrol routes instead. For the combat system, we incorporated a RPG-style fighting system made up of ridiculous Josh Williams attacks (Taking a Phone Call, Sending a 15-Page E-mail, Encouraging but Non-Committal Answer) and equally funny employee attacks (Resource Request, Vision Affirmation, and Technical Hurdle). We then matched up Josh's attack and the employee attack for a rock-paper-scissors combat resolution grid.

Plotting Together on Saturday Morning for Game in a Day

Download Josh Adventure here!

MazeFoller

Team Members: Matt Fairfax, Stephen Zepp, Brett Seyler, and Talana Fairfax

Game Description:We were after a multiplayer Tron clone with people instead of colored lines and evaporating trails with bombs and power-ups and all that goodness. Talana knocked out these spiffy animated characters and even the tiles you see in the maze.

MazeFoller in TGB

Comb-over Joe, Muscle Mike, and Sexy Lexy

Development Process and Challenges: We ran into a bit of trouble with the Tile Map editor (used to draw the mazes) and even more trying to get real-time networking figured out (not currently solved for TGB). We got close, but definitely a bigger hurdle than we'd imagined.

From Game Concepts (Top Left) to Art (Top Right) to Defining the Details (Bottom Left) to Coding (Bottom Right).
Unfortunately, although we got some neat stuff running in our game, we were unable to make a prototype, so we're not showcasing the game yet.

Final Thoughts

Game in a Day was good for us, not only because it was extremely fun, but because it made us more aware of what it's like to be a Torque developer. We found lots to like, lots we want to fix, tweak and tune, and had a great weekend. We'll keep plugging away at Torque technology on our end, and we hope you have as much fun as we did making games with Torque.

Call to Action: GG Internships

Deborah Marshall — 2008-01-23T20:55:03+00:00

It's that time of year again: the weather is freezing our extremities, the holiday rush of games are over, and people are looking ahead to the next best thing. For me, that means drafting internship needs for GarageGames.

Interns may be the coffee gophers of the world at other companies, but not at GarageGames. Interns are a very important tradition here. Important GG icons such as him, him, and yes, even him began in the coveted internship position. We take interns very seriously because they are a better way of evaluating future employees than just doing a bunch of interviews. What better way to get to know each other than to work together for three months on one of our important projects?

So why should you be interested? Well, I admit I'm a little biased, but hey, I'm entitled to my opinion on my own blog. You should be excited because it rocks to work at GarageGames. When I graduated from the University of Oregon, I wanted a creative job that I love going to every day. I haven't been disappointed. GarageGames, though growing, is still small enough that I have front row access to all sorts of exciting projects like the evolution of Torque engines, the Instant Action launch, and the creation of Fallen Empire: Legions. I interact daily with people whom I consider both friends and colleagues. And I also get to help out with a variety of traditional job functions that would be compartmentalized in a bigger company, like HR, marketing, and development. All this, and I get to live in a city that boasts a pretty high quality of life. Don't get me wrong: life at GarageGames is demanding. Every employee puts 110% of themselves into their work, whether it is executive management or Quality Assurance. But to me, working with dedicated people only motivates me to become that much better, and the work is part of the experience. Looking back at what I've contributed to since I started full-time at GarageGames, I can only get excited about what's yet to come.

As you've probably guessed by now, there's a lot of work to be done. That's where you step in:

What's in it for you?
- Daily Wii Tennis Matches
- Board Game nights every Friday with your bosses
- Real-world training and experience in the video game industry
- Accommodations at our Intern House (free rent!)
- Flexible scheduling for students
- School credit

Just so you know, to be eligible for internships, candidates MUST be in school or eligible for receiving school credit or clock hours. (You do not actually have to apply for or receive credit.) Generally interns work for three months, and we're willing to let candidates start anytime between March and June (although the sooner you start, the better for us).

So if you're interested in any of these positions, e-mail internships@garagegames.com your resume, cover letter, and portfolio of website, programming and/or art samples. Apply soon because we've already got some applicants biting at the apple. I look forward to targeting you with a nerf gun in the near future!

TGB 1.6 Released...and Manatees?

Deborah Marshall — 2007-12-14T22:34:22+00:00

TGB 1.6 is out. Get it here!

Last weekend, I created a game. It was based on the classic Asteroids, but I decided to personalize it. I am a big supporter of the Save the Manatee organization, so, instead of a spaceship, I used a manatee. And instead of asteroids, I had motorboats. Sadly, it won't be coming to a store near you. My collisions didn't work right. The crunch deadline passed and I still had no fish bullet functionality. But I am now officially a newbie game creator.

Georgia: My Adopted Manatee

Recently Stephen Zepp put on a Boot Camp for the non-programmers of the Tech & Tools Unit at GarageGames. Unlike other people in the Garage who are working 'round the clock on the next best place for you to publish and play games (InstantAction) or the great new games we're building for it, OUR mission is to bring you the absolute best game engines and tools at an affordable price. We're working overtime to improve documentation, our forums, our website, and of course the tech itself. Everyday, we are working towards better solutions for Torque and have various projects that are handling all these issues.

My particular role in this new unit is to merge customer needs with software development so that we can keep moving forward on the Torque line. (If you want an official title, I am the Torque Product Group Manager.) As my first official Tech & Tools blog, I am proud to announce TGB 1.6! Here's what you can expect in this new version:

Engine & Tool
- File IO issues have been fixed, a doc explaining some of the changes and principles of it can be found here.
- Camera mounting jitter is fixed
- An issue in which a cloned object that had behaviors would not trigger its behaviors "onAdd" and "onAddToScene" callbacks has been fixed
- Fixed a collision issue causing "walking through objects"
- Fixed various issues with the 'Tree View' based GUI's
- Project Templates can now specify resource includes
- Scene Editor will now properly dismount objects, paths, etc when deleting children and / or parent objects
- Jumping mouse in Tiger fixed (Mac Specific)

Animation Builder
- The image browser will now display 'LINK' image maps
- The trash icon will now properly trash all animation frames

GUI Editor
- When saving a new GUI, the editor will now properly add the .gui extension
- When saving a new GUI, the editor will now remember the file name when re-saving
- It is now possible to select locked gui items, but still impossible to move or resize them
- Resolved some GUI object selection issuesa

Project Builder
- Company and product name entries
- Updates the game project's commonConfig.xml file with proper information
- Renames executable with the product name
- Updates game's window title with product name

Documentation
- Some "TGB Reference" description updates
- Syntax examples have been added to methods for t2dSceneobject in the "TGB Reference"
- Tutorials have had a compatibility pass

If you have any specific questions about what is changed, we've made a forum post for it here.

For those of you who need to play around with TGB now, go ahead and download it on your "My Account" page or buy it here. For those of you are interested, sidebar with me into a journey into the past. TGB has been through many incarnations in its day. Below is a chart of the releases we've done on it (not including version 1.6):

It's been great to see what people have done with TGB. I am continually amazed that people with all levels of experience - from newbies to former commercial developers - can take TGB and produce fantastic games. A few great examples (in no particular order):

Amaranth Games's Grimm's Hatchery: A beautiful game that lets you explore a medieval world and raise magical pets. Grimm's Hatchery is Amaranth Games's first use of any GarageGames engine. The company specializes in casual games and RPGs with big stories from the SNES generation.

Top Meadow's Poker Puzzle: An extremely addictive game that mixes your love of gambling and puzzle strategy. Puzzle Poker was one of the earliest TGB games releases on our website. In fact, my partner-in-crime Eric Fritz was one of the early play testers of the game.

Conor O'Kane's DroneSwarm: A shoot 'em up game that won 6th place in the Shmup-dev 'Options' 2k7 Competition. With only artist experience, Conor made the game completely from TorqueScript between June and October 2007 working evenings and weekends. He only needed two other developers - Kevin Ross did music and Alex Parker did music and sound effects - to complete the prototype. It wasn't easy, of course. In his own words to me, "As I went along I made many mistakes - I found the feedback of people on the GarageGames forums and IRC channel and the shmup-dev website invaluable for correcting my mistakes and teaching me proper programming practices."

Thanks for being a great community and helping us bring TGB this far. We definitely couldn't have done it without you. I look forward to working with you to push the boundaries further into 2008. And maybe I can take the manatee concept into other classics. Hmm...

Doing what you love

Deborah Marshall — 2007-08-10T07:04:50+00:00

Hello world.

A few of you may recognize me from such hits as the "Torque X Beta Survey," one of the projects I worked on as an intern here for the last year. I've literally graduated to become a card carrying member of the GG ranks.

I've been meaning to write a blog post for a while, but the title of "Survey Girl" doesn't lend itself to a lot of friendly, casual conversation (emphasis on "friendly"). And unlike a lot of cool guys here working directly on top secret projects of various natures, I simply act as support doing a little market research and analysis here and there. Nothing to write home about. ("Mom, guess what statistical calculation I did today!")

But what I lack in street cred with many of you, I can identify with the pursuit of doing what you love. For about 14 years now, I have been a serial writer. I started out with short stories in high school, and then slowly and painfully wrote an novel over an eight year period. Once I'd finally finished my first one, crappy though it was, I wrote another novel. Neither have been published, but I consider finishing both of them one of my greatest life achievements.

Sound familiar to anyone else out there?

It isn't easy making this choice. It takes a lot of discipline to finish such a lofty goal. A lot of people didn't believe I could finish it (especially when I hit the 4-year mark with my first novel). Others showed only vague interest in what I was doing. ("That's great, Deborah. And did you hear about Paris Hilton yesterday?"). And I lost my will to finish many times ("Novel or Zelda? Novel or Zelda? Hmm....").

But over time, I did reach my goals. And I've got new goals too, even though I'm in one of my hibernation modes. And in the meantime, I've managed to snag an awesome day job, where I am never bored and get to learn from the best of the pros in this industry. And best of all, it supports my passion, because there is no shortage of creativity and perseverance in the Garage.

So good luck to all of you out there. I hope I can help you out in my own small way with my silly little surveys and a few spreadsheets here and there.