Blog for Kenneth Holst at GarageGames.com

The value of Plastic

Kenneth Holst — 2008-06-27T23:11:19+00:00

We at the Garage have been working on improving and revitalizing the GarageGames Associate Program, of which several of the folks at Plastic Games are members. Seeing their recent activity on the site is exciting because it lets GG know we're heading down the right track.

We share early information about engine direction, grant access to engine code repositories, and keep in close communication directly with the Associates. In return they pass their wealth of knowledge back to you, the community. Whether cranking out awesome resources like these "plastic gems," being a helpful presence on the forums, or anything in between, Associates rock.

For those of you who have been too busy making games to notice, the Resources section of GarageGames.com has been richly rewarded lately with the inclusion of what Plastic Games likes to call their "Plastic Gems." Don't let the name throw you though - these Plastic Gems are anything but valueless.

That's right, the guys at Plastic Games have reached into the mine carts of their hearts and ripped valuable, raw, resources right out - and handed them to you for the low price of nothing at all. Let's take a look at just what I'm talking about here.

A little about Plastic Games and their gems, in their own words:

"Plastic Games is a small independent games development company that makes a living generally doing contract game development and generally using Torque. We have been doing this for several years now and we have a policy of code re-use that we call making "gems." A gem is a self contained bit of code and/or art, often along with some useful conventions, that solves a particular problem in a way that makes it easy to use this solution again in the future. The name comes from the famous Graphics Gems and Game Programming Gems series of books.

Over the years we have made quite a few useful gems for Torque, and it has saved us a lot of time and effort. The more we use our gems the more we realize it was worth making them. In an effort to give back to the community, we present Gem A Day! For the next few weeks we will be posting one Plastic Gem per work day as a resource for the Torque game development community."

Like a Be-Dazzler for your project, these guys have provided some truly awesome Gems to use in any way that you like, in both TGE and TGEA.

Artists and level designers will enjoy Kirk Alberts Urban Decay Gems - featuring several interiors and over 370 textures for you to use, links to good places to get textures from, and some tricks and techniques that he uses to improve the visuals in his work.

Coders will enjoy some really cool Gems from Paul Dana. With sample shapes and code, these Gems will help the user by taking you step by step, from one Gem to the next.

With so much content, it's best to just let the Gems speak for themselves. I encourage everyone to check them out if you haven't already, and send some warm feelins' to Paul, Kirk, and everyone at Plastic Games for sharing these resources with the community.

It's great to see such generosity, and I feel that it is appropriate to award to Plastic Games the Official Seal of Awesomeness. Thank you!

Associates Program Exposed

Kenneth Holst — 2008-04-25T00:48:19+00:00

Hey everyone! Let's talk about the Associate Program here at GarageGames. You've probably come across Associates here and there as you visit different parts of the site. But let's take a moment to really ponder a deep and complex issue: what is an Associate?

To many, the process of becoming an Associate is shrouded in mystery and legend. What are the benefits and responsibilities of being one? How do I become an Associate?

Do I have to go through brutal training to be an Associate?

Most of the time, an Associate is simply found directly in the community by doing some kick ass stuff. Some things that jump out at us are:

An active forum presence. The way in which a person interacts with users of differing skill levels and the ability to be professional and respectful in sometimes-heated threads says a lot about their character.
Michael Perry has been a very active person in the forums as many of you know, and does a great job of this.
Knowledge of Torque and related technologies. Some amazing contributions to Torque have come from Associates! Jeff Faust and his AFX Packs, John Kanalakis and his TorqueX 3D work, and Josh Engebretson and his work on MegaTerrains for example.
Working with Betas and new tech. Submitting bugs and participating in discussions regarding the direction of current and future Torque products is part of the process of making Torque rock! John Kabus fixed lots of bugs and Joseph Greenawalt logged lots of bugs during the TGEA 1.7 betas.

An Associate wrestles with TGEA

So that's what Associates do for us. Here's a little of what we give back:

An increased level of communication. We take Associate feedback very seriously and communicate often with them regarding product roadmaps and the direction in which current and future products will be heading.
Early access. Everything from completely new projects, to major updates to current projects, and everything in-between are given to Associates before the rest of the community.
Work possibilities. We often have contractual jobs available for Associates to take on. Some have even directly led to full-time GG employment! David Blake has been working contractually with us and doing an awesome job as a forum moderator. Many of the people working here today at GarageGames have come from previously working with us as Associates.

In short, we try to take care of our Associates in any way we can and provide them with lots of interesting opportunities!

I would like at this point to extend a warm welcome to three new Associates and show you some of their latest kick-assery:

Rene Damm. Rene has spent a lot of time working on improving and fixing up Atlas, as you can see in the forums. From compiling fixes and bugs, to actually doing the grunt work and fixing them, Rene has been very interested in helping to make Atlas better for everyone.
Jaimi McEntire. Jaimi has made many, many contributions towards the improvement of Torque Constructor! Torque Constructor 1.0.4 is something he took upon himself, and the reaction to it has been great!
Chris Robertson. His Houdini Exporter Beta work and Milkshape Exporter speak for themselves. He also has a nifty resource for Multiple skins on a single model.

Can you spot Rene, Chris, and Jaimi in this picture?

So, what's next for the Associates Program? Well, one of my jobs is to run the program and make sure it runs in a way that makes both the Associates and GarageGames happy. I'll be investing a lot of thought into making the process more clear to the community as well.

We currently have about 75 Associates, some of whom are very active, and some who have moved onto other things. In the near future, I will be talking to the Associates to figure out what they want to get out of the program. We plan to make this program much more robust than it has been in the past. Ultimately I would like to see a smaller, more core group of individuals, working together to help make the GarageGames community great.

Thanks for reading, and congrats again Rene, Jaimi, and Chris!

TGEA Beta wrap up - thoughts and thanks

Kenneth Holst — 2008-04-07T23:36:18+00:00

Hello everyone. As you all know, we recently released TGEA 1.7.0 and have been very happy to hear some of the positive things people have had to say about it! We hope as you spend some quality time with this release that you let us know your thoughts via the handy survey link provided within the documentation, to help us better understand your needs and concerns as the end-users of this product.

One of the things we wanted to bring about with this release was to try to really include the community more in helping us track down bugs and submit feedback regarding the documentation as well as the various beta releases as they were handed off for you to bang away on. We got some great feedback and some really nasty bugs were found and squashed.

This Bombardier beetle represents a nasty bug quite nicely, no?

As Matt has stated previously in his own blog, you guys really came through in spades and we could not have done it without you! People submitted bugs in a well written, easy to reproduce format, and it paid off considerably when it came to adding them to our bug tracker and going through and fixing them. We are definitely going to continue working on improving this process of communication, sharing and collecting bug reports from you, and releasing regular betas and updates. I look forward to future betas and working again with all of you!

*Simulated GarageGames community member pointing out a couple of bugs.

I mentioned a while back that I would be coming up with some prizes and other goodies to give back to certain members of the community as a way of saying 'thank you!' for helping us to track down and squash bugs among other things. Initially, I had planned to come up with some metric or method of determining who specifically gets what. Well, that didn't happen this time. Due to time constraints I was pretty heads down working on getting this release into your hands as quickly as possible.

So, how did we decide who gets what? It was a pretty non-scientific process, involving talking between Matt and myself, going over submitted bugs, reading some tea leaves, and rolling some 12-sided die's I dug out my Dungeons and Dragons stuff in my parent's basement. In the future, I'm guessing we will have a little more time to dedicate to making the process a little more 'transparent' to the community.

So, this time around, we have decided to award to Rene Damm one commercial upgrade to TGEA (an $1195.00 USD value)

...and to Mike Rowley a cool $100.00 USD worth of merchandise of his choosing from the GarageGames store. Congrats guys, and thanks for the help with the TGEA beta!

Lastly, I want to reiterate once again what a big help all of you were in helping us to release this version of TGEA. Thank you!