Torque 3D 1.2 - Tutorial Revealed

It’s Friday again, time for another Torque 3D 1.2 Update. Last week I went over some of the finer granularity of the 3rd/1st person split that we’ve made so far (Part 1, Part 2). I ended it with a small video showing off just a small taste of what our artists have been able to do with it so far. This week I’ll be giving a high level overview of the tutorial that we’ve been working on, covering a cradle to grave experience on creating a multiplayer FPS with Torque 3D.

First off I’d like to introduce and talk about the people behind the tutorial. In charge of managing the tutorial creation as well as writing a large chunk is David Montgomery-Blake. For you newcomers, David has been part of the Torque community since 2002. He started off helping with the moderation of our forums, answering questions and handling all sorts of support inquiries as a contractor while also working at a local university in Idaho. When we started back up earlier this year we knew that we wanted a person to fill the role of community evangelist and luckily David was available and willing.

This decision turned out to be even better than we had hoped when we decided to start up development of the tutorial for 1.2. We needed a manager at the helm that had a good understand of Torque and the issues that people face when trying to learn how to make games with it. What better guy than David to step into that role and really drive the outline and development of the tutorial piece. As I mentioned David has also stepped up and written a couple of the sections himself to help us meet our deadlines and drive forward.

The second person that we brought on to help with this effort was Janet Fisher. Janet comes to us from the “sunshine state” of Washington. Fresh off a gig with Microsoft writing documentation for Surface as well as their Expression Blend product, she was the perfect fit to bring some new viewpoints on how we constructed our documentation. Janet has also taught lessons on how to use UDK so we knew she had the chops for some game engine material. Janet jumped right into learning Torque 3D and hasn’t stopped since. She has been all over the place on the project from setting up the style guide for the tutorial, to making sure all sections had a consistent tone and feel. This all on top of writing a majority of the tutorial herself. Janet has been a great addition to the team and her polish and experience can be seen all over the tutorial.

Some of you may have seen Chris Tauscher roaming through the forums lately. Chris started off helping us in the QA department but has quickly seen himself lending a hand all over the place. Amongst helping David with community management as well as Add-On Store submissions Chris has also contributed to several sections of the tutorial. Both in the capacity as a QA guy as well as a writer himself.

The writers also worked a great deal with the programmers to make sure that the correct methods were being described as well as tackling any issues that inhibited the development of the tutorial. This means that a good number of work-flow issues as well as bugs were addressed to help remove any roadblocks that a person might experience while trying to go through the tutorial. We’ve also recently added two additional writers in Richard Ranft and Geoff Beckstrom. They’ll be jumping onto the project in its final stages adding as much polish as possible before we ship.

That covers the awesome development team so now lets jump into the tutorial content just a bit. Again the goal of the tutorial was to teach people with varying levels of experience how game building works with Torque 3D using an FPS as a vehicle to deliver that information. Here is a work in progress preview of our table of contents:

Tutorial Table of Contents

Seeing as how I am feeling generous I’ve decided to include a sample of one of the sections:

Introduction to Scripting

Those of you following Eric’s tweets may have already seen this (for those of you not following GG or Eric on Twitter I would recommend it for cool Torque news). Again another work in progress but it gives everyone a sense of where we are going.

Next steps are translating this into the website and finding ways of making it easy to get at the information you are looking for but being able to dive into detail when you want it. Next week I’ll cover some of the planned web improvements to help enhance the tutorial experience. Seeing as how the tutorial material doesn’t lend itself well to imagines and in the spirit of Eric’s Zombie Blog I’ve decided to end with a teaser image of another pack we are working on that will coincide with the Torque 3D 1.2 launch. I’ll be going over the details of the pack as well as several others in a few weeks.

Until next week!

Torque 3D 1.2 Development Blogs:

• Introduction
• Chinatown
• Turrets, Proximity Mines and Teleporters oh my!
• Disembodied Arms
• Disembodied Arms, Part Deux
• Tutorial Revealed
• Tutorial and GarageGames.com - Coming Soon!