My first blog - So much to do
by Jean-Pierre Cuerrier · 06/26/2007 (3:07 am) · 5 comments
Hello everyone,
I just wanted to say hi and share with you my game development experience thus far. We are a small team of 2 programmers (including myself) and 3 artists. We have set off to create a single player/ coop multiplayer action adventure game. We all work full time jobs and are doing this in our spare time, like a lot of the Indies in this community. On average recently I am dedicating about 20 hours per week to this project, however there have been weeks which I have put in a good 100 hours.
Thus far we have created a very respectable Main Menu, and we are working on finishing our first town (80 percent complete), our first forest area (80 percent complete) and our first temple (40 percent complete). We have a good story, our design docs for these areas and others are quite good (although a little thin in some places) and we feel that we have the correct graphical tools in place to proceed successfully further. So far this project has been in development for 6 months.
A few years ago, I created my own 3d API. It was very basic as it did not have any lighting features or texturing enable (though I feel I could have put this in to the API in a couple of nights). All of that knowledge should have helped me understand TGE. On the contrary, I found myself lost in the engine source and it's tools. It took me about 6 months (prior to this project) to really understand what was going on, but I still have some trouble from time to time. The main reason is that all the code that I wrote for my API was done in c/c++ and now I find that the majority of the code we do for this project is done in Torque Script.
Recently the we are having issues with art, and specifically making characters. All three of our artists have never been part of a gamedev team and so no one knows how to make a character. I decided to take on the task and find out how difficult it really was. Well... about 10 hours later I came up with this:
I know what you are thinking, what exactly is this. Lemme explain it. It is the body of a zombie/undead creature with no head. I hope that explains why the feet are turned in. Not sure what I am doing with it's hands yet... but I'll try to figure this out later today. What do you think??? OKAY... take it eazy :o) I am not an artist and I just learned Blender to make this character. This undead college of mine took me about 10 hours total to create( had to restart once) and this also includes the basic animation for breathing. Just a quick question, anyone know how many polys I should shot for in a character?
Once we have our characters are created, I can place them in town and finish the AI for those characters. I hope to have the town and the forest completed by mid July.
For your viewing pleasure, here are some more screens:
Our main character
a hidden shope in the forest
A townsman house
Well, that is it for now,
Thank for reading!
Realtime
I just wanted to say hi and share with you my game development experience thus far. We are a small team of 2 programmers (including myself) and 3 artists. We have set off to create a single player/ coop multiplayer action adventure game. We all work full time jobs and are doing this in our spare time, like a lot of the Indies in this community. On average recently I am dedicating about 20 hours per week to this project, however there have been weeks which I have put in a good 100 hours.
Thus far we have created a very respectable Main Menu, and we are working on finishing our first town (80 percent complete), our first forest area (80 percent complete) and our first temple (40 percent complete). We have a good story, our design docs for these areas and others are quite good (although a little thin in some places) and we feel that we have the correct graphical tools in place to proceed successfully further. So far this project has been in development for 6 months.
A few years ago, I created my own 3d API. It was very basic as it did not have any lighting features or texturing enable (though I feel I could have put this in to the API in a couple of nights). All of that knowledge should have helped me understand TGE. On the contrary, I found myself lost in the engine source and it's tools. It took me about 6 months (prior to this project) to really understand what was going on, but I still have some trouble from time to time. The main reason is that all the code that I wrote for my API was done in c/c++ and now I find that the majority of the code we do for this project is done in Torque Script.
Recently the we are having issues with art, and specifically making characters. All three of our artists have never been part of a gamedev team and so no one knows how to make a character. I decided to take on the task and find out how difficult it really was. Well... about 10 hours later I came up with this:
I know what you are thinking, what exactly is this. Lemme explain it. It is the body of a zombie/undead creature with no head. I hope that explains why the feet are turned in. Not sure what I am doing with it's hands yet... but I'll try to figure this out later today. What do you think??? OKAY... take it eazy :o) I am not an artist and I just learned Blender to make this character. This undead college of mine took me about 10 hours total to create( had to restart once) and this also includes the basic animation for breathing. Just a quick question, anyone know how many polys I should shot for in a character?
Once we have our characters are created, I can place them in town and finish the AI for those characters. I hope to have the town and the forest completed by mid July.
For your viewing pleasure, here are some more screens:
Our main charactera hidden shope in the forestA townsman houseWell, that is it for now,
Thank for reading!
Realtime
About the author
Software Engineer for the Department of National Defence (Canada) during the day, I work part time on game projects and attempt to do so as professionally as possible by leveraging my experience. Blog: http://instantcarnage.tumblr.com/
#2
06/26/2007 (4:38 am)
Oh also, try and find modelling reference shots and anatomy reference. Your character is way out of proportion and you'll find these references help. 
#3
www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/tutorial.htm
www.johnson-mortimer.co.uk/tutorials.html
www.bakaneko.com/howto/computer/3d/character/page01.html
06/26/2007 (5:26 am)
Here are some links I use from time to time. I love adventure games and cut my gaming teeth on them heh.www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/tutorial.htm
www.johnson-mortimer.co.uk/tutorials.html
www.bakaneko.com/howto/computer/3d/character/page01.html
#4
06/26/2007 (7:12 am)
Nice stuff Jean-Pierre and team! :0)
#5
06/27/2007 (1:00 am)
Wow! Thank you all for your extremely useful comments! This is why I love the Garage Games community! 
Torque 3D Owner Phil Carlisle
Poly budget is something your whole team needs to decide on based on the game design. How many characters, how many bones etc.
Rough idea, is about 2000-3000 triangles. Less is better.