Plan for Jeremy Alessi

Well, this year I didn't drive the kids as hard as last year. Instead of making them code their own stuff I quickly coded some simple principles and let them have a look and I also explained things line by line for them. I think the two boys I had today might just make it as indies ;) It's the first time I've had kids that actually wanted to go indie instead of work for Square, Nintendo, or Sony!

I guess I was able to convice them that being independent with your creativeness is very important. I'm really happy to see that kids take independent games seriously and would consider it as a career for themselves. I hope that within the next few years the industry stabilizes and independent development gets to be a fair chunk of the pie. I think it will and I do my best everyday personally to ensure that it does.

The fun part of the shadowing of course was developing King of the Mountain a little more. I gave them a general understanding of Torque on both the engine side and the script side. I showed them some of the C++ source and explained why I had to create certain variables or decisions structures and how they related to the game script. I also let them edit some things in script and showed them the equivalent edit process within the world editor. By the end we had improved the look of the game with better lighting, we adjusted the power of the accelerators, and added some fun structures to climb up for better weapons.

Again, I have seen people having a lot of fun with the concept of KOTM and I'm very excited. I think I really have a good game on my hands and I'm proud of the soundness I've produced in the prototype. The basic gameplay is all there and it's enjoyable. The rest of development will as usual be the toughest though. The game needs a decent number of maps and they must be balanced and thoroughly playtested. Characters need to be created and I've got several options on that end which I've got to make a decision on. It's going to be a tough decision because so many people applied to work on the game but with the quality of everyone's work being so good I think it will be hard to make a bad decision ... I just wish I didn't have to leave anyone out :( Expect to see some custom art work popping up in June though.

Another thing I just have to mention is how great it is to develop the game cross platform simultaneously. I'm able to accomplish so much more and faster than ever before with an LAN going and to boot it's a cross platform LAN so both my Mac and PC versions of the game will be done simultaneously for release. I'll of course be considering a Linux port but I'll save it for later since I don't have a Linux boot on any of my machines. Perhaps I'll stick one on my laptop though and plug it into the LAN for a tri-platform development environment.

The last thing I have to say for now is how proud I am to showcase my game on the Torque platform. It's really such a different experience from other tools I've used and made for much less of a hassle. The game wasn't buggy and I didn't have to waste valuable time debugging things or transferring tons of files from machine to machine. In the past when I've done these things some sort of bug always reared it's ugly head in an alpha build of any of my games either that or letting the kids create new levels was a hassle because the tools weren't up to the task. With Torque I was able to show these kids how a game can be created fairly easily and efficiently with a strong backend and I enjoyed it.