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The Finish Line

Name:	Joe Maruschak
Date Posted:	Sep 30, 2006
Rating:	4.8 out of 5
Public:	YES
Comments:	YES
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Blog post

Whee! I can finally talk about one of the things I have been working on during the last year. This week, Rack'em Up Road Trip shipped on MSN!

Rack'em up Road Trip reperesents the first commercial title that was developed in house at GarageGames (in partnership with Oberon Media) using Torque Game Builder, and demonstrates our commitment to 'eat our own dog food'. With every peice of technology we make, we feel compelled to put it through its paces and give it a real world run through the guantlet.

We started Rack 'em up Road Trip last year with a pre-release version of Torque Game Builder. Starting in early on the engine development process, we worked hard by tackling what is actually a pretty difficult project.

First, we had to match the feel and rules of a game that people have real world experience with. We could not ignore interface issues that were not working or change the rules if things were confusing. We had to work toward solutions. There were a myriad of small interface issues with foul reporting, communicating the players which balls were 'legal' (particularly with snooker), and challenges with the AI in getting them to be fun enough to play against. Additionally, we upped the ante by adding some sort of movement 'bling' to every GUI screen. Very little of the in game navigation is done on static screens. We made a pretty big game, and we still kept the download very reasonable (in the 10MB range) and kept memory usage low.

We faced many difficulties and challenges, and in the process, TGB became a much stronger engine because of it. What did not work, we had to fix, where the workflow was not usable, we created tools to help speed the process along. We suffered through this pain so you guys did not have to.

We knew going in that this would be a hard road, and we also believed that the engine, even at that early state, was up to the challenge we were taking on. TGB measured up, and did not let us down.

I want to send out a massive thanks to the team, Robert Blanchett, who took the lead on programming and was with this project from beginning to end, Mark McCoy, without whose help the game would not look half as good as it does, Zach Zadell, without who we would have no single player game, Justin DuJardin, who was instrumental in giving us our whoosy, blingee GUIs. A shout goes out to Adam, Clark, Pat, Jeff, Josh, Melv, Paul, Eric Elwell, and everyone else who contributed to getting this game accross the finish line.

Check it out!

Recent Blog Posts

List:	11/07/06 - Focusing development by way of bootstrapping 10/20/06 - New Human 2.0 09/30/06 - The Finish Line 09/03/06 - Value of a Thing 06/18/06 - The shape of things to come 06/11/06 - Starting a Studio: Things we did right 06/02/06 - You Can Do it! 09/05/05 - The importance of theme

Submit your own resources!

Todd Pickens (Sep 30, 2006 at 16:49 GMT)

Very Cool!

Congrats guys!

Adam deGrandis (Sep 30, 2006 at 16:50 GMT)

Yes, THE Adam deGrandis.

Awesome, so good to see these out in the world.

Eric Elwell (Sep 30, 2006 at 16:51 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Rock on!! Go play it NOW!

Prairie Games (Sep 30, 2006 at 16:59 GMT)

Wow! That is an amazing amount of polish. Very cool :)

Looking forward to meeting you in a week :)

Rubes (Sep 30, 2006 at 17:03 GMT)

Sweet...it looks great. I'll have to check this out. Congrats!

Harold "LabRat" Brown (Sep 30, 2006 at 17:14 GMT)

So that's what happened to the Pool Demo... I wanted to add 9-ball and a few other game types to it when it was first shown

Paul Dana (Sep 30, 2006 at 17:15 GMT)

Phew! Finally! Nice going

Jeremy Alessi (Sep 30, 2006 at 17:48 GMT)

Very awesome, can't wait to play it! Why no publication on the GG site?

*I see MSN wanted it all for themselves eh? Really nice presentation by the way, I can see a lot of love went into it.*
Edited on Sep 30, 2006 17:57 GMT

Anton Bursch (Sep 30, 2006 at 18:47 GMT)

Quote:
We suffered through this pain so you guys did not have to

i wouldn't say that's entirely true.

But, anyway, I'm buying this game asap... cause it looks fun.
Edited on Sep 30, 2006 18:48 GMT

ando (Sep 30, 2006 at 19:07 GMT)

I am not really a fan of mini games but this one I like :)

Jeremy Alessi (Sep 30, 2006 at 19:52 GMT)

TGB is by far the least painless game development tool I've ever used. It's the equivalent of Photoshop for games.

Logan Foster (Sep 30, 2006 at 19:59 GMT)

Awesome Joe. It must feel good for you guys to get this monkey off of your backs and have it out the door for mass consumption :)

Mark McCoy (Sep 30, 2006 at 20:02 GMT)

I would like to send out a big thank you to Adam DeGrandis for allowing us to license his name for screenshots. If you need a name for your product screenshots, I highly recommend Adam DeGrandis. His rates are very reasonable.

Domo arigato Mr. Roberto... domo... domo...
Edited on Sep 30, 2006 20:59 GMT

Tom Spilman (Sep 30, 2006 at 20:42 GMT)

I just played it. It's a really nice version of pool... congrats guys!

Stephen Zepp (Sep 30, 2006 at 21:35 GMT)

Quote:

Quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We suffered through this pain so you guys did not have to
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i wouldn't say that's entirely true.

But, anyway, I'm buying this game asap... cause it looks fun.

No one said it (TGB) was perfect yet Anton, but if you take a look at when Rack 'em up Road Trip was in development, we're talking before the Level Builder was even in prototype stage.

TGB is several orders of magnitude easier to work with due in no small part to the pain of developing a large and high quality game with it compared to where it (then T2D pre level builder) stood more than a year ago.
Edited on Sep 30, 2006 21:36 GMT

Mark McCoy (Sep 30, 2006 at 22:35 GMT)

Heh, yes, don't misunderstand "this" pain you don't have to suffer. But there is still plenty of pain to go around. ;) heh heh...

David Stewart (Sep 30, 2006 at 23:01 GMT)

This is great to see!
I hope you get many downloads and purchases.

Dan MacDonald (Sep 30, 2006 at 23:04 GMT)

This game has one of the nicest "shells" I've seen in a while. Great production values.

Tom Bentz (Sep 30, 2006 at 23:48 GMT)

Congrats! Downloading right now!

Alex Rice (Oct 01, 2006 at 01:23 GMT) Resource Rating: 4

So this is what happenned to the TGB billiards demo that was under development :-) can't wait to play this. I love seeing polished TGB games in action.

David Stewart (Oct 01, 2006 at 01:29 GMT)

Just played it.

Only thing I didnt like was that the installer wouldn't let me choose where to install.

Gustavo Boni (Oct 01, 2006 at 01:47 GMT)

Tha ball physics was implemented with a 3rd part solution? Or it's built-in in the engine?

Keith Frampton (Oct 01, 2006 at 03:22 GMT)

...
Edited on Apr 04, 2007 14:40 GMT

Travis Wood (Oct 01, 2006 at 03:53 GMT)

I Say:

This looks great!! Show microsoft this for xbox live arcade. You can do that with this tiltle.

Anton Bursch (Oct 01, 2006 at 05:24 GMT)

WARNING!! If you have work to get done... DO NOT play this game!!

Don't say anyone didn't tell you. Now I gotta get back to pla... working.

Philippe Thiboutot (Oct 01, 2006 at 06:35 GMT)

This looks really really sharp!

Edit: managed to get it to work.. faulty sound drivers...

Thanks a lot! =)
Edited on Nov 29, 2006 20:04 GMT

Alex Rice (Oct 01, 2006 at 07:31 GMT) Resource Rating: 4

Try the 2nd-beer-accuracy-powerup ... This game is slick. Ka-Bling!

Clint S. Brewer (Oct 01, 2006 at 09:25 GMT)

love all the little touches, the balls rolling down in your slots, the shadows, the rolling in the pockets

Tank Dork (Oct 01, 2006 at 11:13 GMT)

Downloaded the demo and played it for 30 minutes.. knew I had to have it after the first game of 8 ball! Bought it in under the hour.
Without a doubt the best looking and playing pool game I have ever played!

Rivage (Oct 01, 2006 at 16:43 GMT)

Did you have to change the TGB source for this game ? I mean with C++ and so on...

Jeremy Alessi (Oct 01, 2006 at 18:53 GMT)

Yeah seriously, what sort of C++ side code did you do for this that isn't included with TGB? Don't hold back on us now ;) There seems to be a few things that would be tough to pull off just using the stock TGB. I personally, would like to see features added to the script to allow us to manipulate verts and some more low level stuff like that. Maybe I missed it in the docs but you could easily add more low level access and keep it easy to use

David Higgins (Oct 02, 2006 at 00:03 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

I'm with everyone else on this -- AWESOME GAME, Can't stop playing.

As for the dev questions, I had no part in it, but from evaluating the game, I've come to the conclusion that the balls have to be 3d objects in the 2d world -- as they rotate on all axis's and I can't see how you can do that with a 2d object without using up WAY too many resources and way too much math... although, I can't seem to find a DTS object in the game install dir ... so they must be creating it dynamically through code (most likely a custom C++ object, as the t2dShape3D object doesn't have the ability to be created without pointing to a DTS object -- from what I can tell) ...

I'm very curious about the physics though, it seems to have a "think ahead" functionality for the helper lines, and the TGB physics don't appear to act anywhere near close to that -- my first TGB demo project was a billiards game, and I abandoned it as I could not get the physics to react like they do in Rack Em Up --- Very impressive, very impressive indeed -- I would have liked to have seen the game on GG's product page though, rather then MSN's ... but eh, we can't have everything we want in life, right?

Melv May (Oct 02, 2006 at 09:40 GMT)

I wrote the original ball physics code and although the balls don't use the t2dShape3D (I believe it wasn't around then), it did use the same shape-rendering code as the t2dShape3D does. It ultimately got changed (by Pat I believe) because we have a highly constrained rendering requirement, just a sphere, rolling so you can make some considerable performance gains there by generating the ball-shape dynamically etc. Also, the balls needed lots of other rendering effects such as shadows etc.

In terms of the "think ahead" functionality, it has a duplicate scene and simulates the move to determine what will happen forward in time.

Massive, massive kudos to GG for the amazing work they've done in shaping the T2D/TGB product and producing such a slick game that performs well. It was such a buzz to see a room-full of guys using T2D to make Rack'Em-Up when I visted.

Just to be clear, this product was written using a very old version of T2D. TGB is so much more powerful now; imagine what could be done with it now!

- Melv.
Edited on Oct 02, 2006 09:49 GMT

Zachary Zadell (Oct 02, 2006 at 18:14 GMT)

Sweet! Adam deGrandis makes the grandest of games!

Alex Swanson (Oct 02, 2006 at 19:29 GMT)

Awesome, congrats to the whole pool team for finally getting this out! The level of polish and bling of this game is really top notch - and these guys have gone through a lot to get it that way. Way to go!

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