GG/Torque Memories

I found Torque on January 15, 2006. I had been doing game development experiments with lots of different technologies including Visual Basic, Flash, OpenGL/C++. I spent about a year working on some RPG concepts in Flash, and writing VB utilities for the Hackmaster Roleplaying Game but what I really wanted to do was 3D gaming. I had no idea that there was even such a thing as an Indie Game Engine then. One day I stumbled upon TheGameCreators.com's FPS Creator and DarkBasic and did that for a couple months. I bought 2 licenses of FPS Creator, the full DarkBasic suite with all available addins. I wrote some RPG add-ins for FPSCreator, which was silly trying to modify a FPS engine for RPG purposes, but it was exciting and inspiring to me. I wanted more.

Now that I was a part of a game development community I began to see what other things were around, and heard about RealmCrafter. I promptly bought 2 licenses and transitioned to their community. I printed out all the documentation and tutorials and started work on a game. I also learned about the 3D art pipelines a lot more here. After 3 weeks and a running game I began to feel despair set in. This is not the droid I was looking for. A little before then I began to read books about game programming in c++ and found something which referenced Torque. I had tucked it aside, but now I went again looking. The demo was clean and ran nicely so I bought it and began to learn it.

I found Dreamer's MMO Series in its early stages and joined his site, where I met lots of likeminded folks, and Dreamer and Ashtara. Here is when I really began to learn about scripting and Online RPG Development and began to pitch in on the MMO tutorials and code. I am deadly passionate about game coding so I learned quickly and was able to contribute a lot. We formalized a company structure and began selling the MMOKIT for about a year, meeting tons of folks with dreams and plans. It was rough going though, and licensing/IP protection issues with GG forced us to close down. During that time I amassed a huge wealth of knowledge about making games, the art pipelines, the engine and scripting, the metagame, back end services. I was able to share a lot of that knowledge with many many folks and made dozens of good friends. I tried to contribute resources where possible.

After MMOKIT closed down, I started up TorqueSchool.com with GG's blessing. We had an amazing gathering of instructors who put months into developing fantastic courses. Our long-term gameplan was quite thorough but it was not something that ran well on a part-time effort. It needed full-time attention and I was unable to sustain it. Nevertheless we all learned a lot from it, both in terms of generating training materials and the art of gathering/scheduling.

In the meantime I was working with a lot of folks on Gryphon, which was a game project based on all the MMOKIT work we had done. We learned about project management, TRAC, scrum meetings, and the large time greed of a game project. Definitely learned that it's near impossible to expect too much from fly-by-night people (myself included) who have families and jobs. I was doing all this with a full-time job and an additional part-time job.

I learned about almost every little corner of the source code. I heard lots of complaints about documentation but it never really bothered me as I was always able to get things done. I bought everything GG made (just about) including several commercial licenses and dozens of art packs. I made about 10 side projects for clients with some really innovative technology as well. I was able to get several people jobs, or large or small contracts through this community, and for a few years earned a living working on torque projects. I pitched in on dozens of game projects and had many a late night call with people asking about running their own game studio, or getting their projects moving forward.

I remember the 1-year contest we ran poorly but with good intentions, and how exciting that was. I remember during all of this how much I wanted to make my *own* game still. Ultimately that desire is what led me away from Torque... the fact that although I was able to do so much with it, I hadn't made a single game with it. Perhaps I tended to get obsessive about modifying engine technology, or perhaps it was the lingering code comment in ShapeBase.cc about fire-breathing dragons. I found Shiva (by StoneTrip.com) and really haven't looked back except for the community.

I remember the FPS Starter Kit that many folks worked on, which was my partner Ashtara's own dream project. And how heartbroken we all were when she passed away last year.

I have met hundreds of passionate folks here and on the IRC chat, at conferences and gatherings. It shaped the course of my life.

Salute to those who made it all possible.

To the future!