Plan for Alan James

Hello Everyone who ends up wandering here!
I thought I'd post a little about our project here and maybe a few new images of stuff
we've been working on.

There are five "official" members of our development team, though the four that
constitute my son and his three friends are not at this point holding up there
end of the development. (That's to light a fire under 'em...hi boys!) edit: they've
jumped into high gear as of May, 2005...yeah Boys!

OK, to the technical stuff. We purchase our Indie license Christmas Day 2004.
Since that time I've slept approximately three hours...OK maybe
four. I used to map quite a bit for Half-Life so we could play our own levels
on our LAN, but stumbled across the TGE, and my sleep habits have never
been the same. We have purchased the Synapse Lighting Pack, The Brave Tree
Car & Warsparrow Pack, Adam Pack and of course both Torque 2D and the
EA of TSE (for later projects).

The premise of Monster Island is the brainchild of my nine year old son. A father
and his two sons crash in the South Pacific on a small uncharted Island. Only the
younger son is uninjured enough to make the trek to the far side of the Island
to an abandoned military base and its radio station. But the bioweapons
experiments that the military were working on now rule the island and the
facilities were abandoned for a reason...Oooo....real scary!!!

Thats the basic story so far, and in regards to the actual development of the
game I've managed -- with a complete lack of any programming knowledge --
to incoporate (with the continued help and patience of a half a dozen members of
the community) in game deformable terrain, flashlights and laser pointers,
basic AI, moving triggered doors, breakable objects. Now it's on to attack AI
and Monster design, tossable weapons, breakable barriers, stenciled shadows (maybe),
and mission barriers (that don't mess up alpha channeled objects).

Our intent is to make a game that incorporates a lot of different game styles into
a fps/3rdperson interface. I don't think we're striving for a run and gun (mainly because
I like eye candy too much and it takes too much of a hit on framerates), but it will involve
some combat, puzzle solving in regards to moving ahead across the island, ancient ruins
with traps and such, hopefully some logical problem solving and a lot of great looking
stuff to look at and move around and through along the way...and of course really really
big guns to blow things up.

I'll try to keep things up to date, but documentation is not my strongest point.
That's all for now, except a new DevScreen "montage" ...is that spelled right?


Hi again everyone, I have a little update that I wanted to post, I still don't know how to do the
link thing here, so here is the web address:

http://www.reallyreallygoodthings.com/New Folder/synapseGaming2_barrel_physics.mpg

I had an epiphany yesterday and this is what I came up with. Let me know what you think!

Alan