Time Flies

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of my joining the GarageGames community.

This milestone brings mixed emotions for me. I am extremely proud of what we've accomplished over the last decade and very happy that GarageGames is getting back to its roots and continuing to move forward but I am sad to say that it will have to continue without me as an employee of GarageGames. I have accepted a job at a small iPhone company called The Playforge (makers of the popular game Zombie Farm). Over the last few years I have felt a growing urge to get back into building games rather than building engines and the dissolution of InstantAction bought that desire into focus. My wife and I have been wanting to move to the San Francisco area for a while and I was delighted to find a small, family oriented company that reminds me a lot of the early days of GarageGames.




You should try out Zombie Farm ;)

How it all began

Looking back over the years it sure has been a wild ride. I first encountered GarageGames when I saw a link to the website in late 2000 on the venerable game programming site flipcode. At that point the website was little more than an announcement about their intention to release a game engine and a really empty forum. I looked at it briefly and then went back to the far more active flipcode forums.

A few months later, the GarageGames website underwent an update and again I followed a link from the flipcode news posts. I was amazed to find the founders of the company (Jeff Tunnell, Rick Overman, and Tim Gift) all posting regularly on the forums (Mark Frohnmayer was still heads down in releasing Tribes 2 at the time). As a neophyte game programmer (read: newb), I had never seen a group of experienced developers interact so openly and easily with anyone who came along with an interesting conversation and it instantly made me want to be a part of the community (that is why it is great to see Eric Graham, Eric Preisz, Michael Perry, Derek Bronson and all of the other guys at the new GarageGames spending time in the community of a dily basis).

Excited by the opportunity to truly learn from those who had already walked the path, I signed up for an account and naively began what would change my life forever.

Back in those days, I was truly a beginner and really had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I wanted to make games and I had far more ideas than I had skills. While I was plugging away on building up my programming skills, I spent many long hours on the forums throwing around my game ideas and trying to start interesting conversations about game development in general. I also took every chance I could to help others with their questions (I had a knack for finding things in the first generation of the search system...which was worse than the one we've had for the last year if you can believe it).

At some point in this time period, I emailed Jeff Tunnell with my idea of writing a series of tutorials about building a game from the ground up while I attempted to do the same (original..I know =P). Apparently my timing was just right because he replied back that he would love to see a series of tutorials like that to help his son learn game development and that he wanted me to help GarageGames prepare the V12 engine (Torque's original name) for public release. Before I knew it, I had a CVS account with access to a bunch of source code that was miles above my skill level.



This is the original Mission Editor

I was in over my head but I wanted to contribute so I started to chip away at things the best that I could. I wrote a few tutorials on how to use the art tools (map2dif and the DTS exporter) as well as built a few example assets to demonstrate the various features of map2dif (like the portalized beach house and the LOD'ed "temple").

Before I got involved with Torque, I had spent some time on a couple of open source projects like Egoboo and Crystal Space. On those projects I had struggled mightily when I had to use commandline compiler (like make or vcbuild) and rejoiced when their was a Visual Studio project. This experience led me to tackle converting the rather complex commandline build process for V12 into a Visual C++ 6.0 Workspace that could be compiled with a single button click (after running a registry patch to allow .cc files to compile in VC6 ;). I'd like to believe that this was the earliest example of my drive to make Torque as accessible as possible. It was also likely what landed me the title of one of the first two Associates =)

Dark Times

Once V12/Torque was released, I spent the first few months building a hoverbike game with some of the other notable early GG community members like Phil Carlise, Ryan J. Parker, and David Byttow. Unfortunately, before we could get very far on this game, I had a massive tragedy in my personal life (divorce) which pulled me away from game development completely for nearly a year.

During this time, I missed the rename of V12 to Torque (another software company already had "V12" trademarked) as well as the triumphant introduction of Melv May and his "fx" resources to the community. Sadly it was many more years until me and Melv became friends.



My wife still makes fun of me for how drunk we were that night =P

IGC 2003

Things began to turn around for me when I was invited to stay with a GG intern for IGC 2003. I madly scrambled to get airline tickets and a rental car to get me to Eugene, Oregon. I actually ended up crashing at the GG intern house (which had no bathroom doors).

This was a watershed moment in my life and it all began because Tom Bampton was bored one day on IRC. He asked if anyone had any silly and quick game ideas to distract him from the serious contract work he was doing. I shared with him the idea of a game that was "soccer with rocket launchers except no one dies" and we threw together a 2 week prototype of BoomBall (with Ryan's help).



Unfortunately I don't have a screenshot of the "streaker" cheat ;)

On Saturday morning of the conference, I wasn't really in the mood to watch the keynote so I went around to the showoff machines and played some of the games. There were some really good games but I noticed that most of them were really serious. I decided that there needed to be something more silly for people to play so I popped in my burned CD of BoomBall and copied it onto a bunch of the machines. I then promptly forgot about it as I got busy with the rest of the conference,

That night there were a series of tournaments played with some of the games on the showoff machines (including prizes sponsored by GarageGames). I had just won an epic game of Legends (first Tribes-like game done in Torque after Tribes 2) and Jay Moore was handing me an nVidia GeForce 5950 when he told me that Jeff Tunnell wanted a word with me. With my head still spinning I allowed myself be guided over to Jeff where he proceeded to tell me that his son had loved BoomBall and, that if I finished the game, then GarageGames would be happy to publish it! Wow!



IGC 2003 was where I met Ben Garney, Robert Blanchet, and Alex Swanson (note Jeff in the background)

This began a series of people telling me how much they loved BoomBall and handing me their business cards with offers to help with the game. This included Joe Maruschak from BraveTree.

When I got back to South Carolina, I started to sort through the stack of cards and trying to figure out the next steps. It quickly became obvious that BraveTree was the best bet to see BoomBall through to shipping so Tom and I started working remotely with them to build a better version of the game.



After a few months of this, I decided I was tired of working long hours during the day at my job as an application programmer for a company that made trash bins and then going home at night to work long hours on BoomBall. I told BraveTree and GarageGames that I was moving to Eugene and that, even if I had to work a minimum wage job elsewhere, I hoped they would allow me to come into the office and work directly with them. Fortunately for me, BraveTree decided I was worth paying a salary and made me an offer. I packed up my tiny little car with everything it could hold, put my cat in the front seat, and drove across the country. I actually beat Tim Aste to Eugene by a day and we stayed with Joe for the first week while we looked for an apartment (he ended up sleeping in his car most nights because Joe's new son was pretty loud).



The beautiful town of Eugene, OR ended up being my home for the next 6 years

I had no money, hardly any possessions (I slept on an air mattress until I spotted someone dumping a real one in the trash room of our apartment complex) but I was working full time on game development with an amazing group of people. I was living the dream!

Continued...

I had hoped to finish this blog tonight but it is getting late and I have a few more things to take care of before I head to bed. I will pick this up tomorrow night and continue my story of GarageGames. Hopefully you will join me then =)

Thanks!