Prepare For Launch

12.12.12 Online at last...

After a couple years of toil, I met a long time goal of mine yesterday, presenting my Torque3D project to the public. I'm not quite ready for a commercial release yet, but in the process of trying to make the deadline, I forced myself to address many issues I'd been procrastinating or just didn't know about.

A major feature of my project is that it will be in three languages: Spanish, English and Nahuatl (for dialogue). This changed how I'm dealing with localization without having a huge pool of resources and money to get it done. My main focus has been to use a little language as possible in the GUIs, and make those elements that require language to be universal or bilingual. Despite the considerable time this is adding to the development of my game, my aim is to involve my primary market, 'Latino/Chicano/Hispano' players 15-35, as early in the development as possible. This has been quite challenging, even with access to a professional interpreter, there are quite a few words in English Sci-Fi that don't have counterparts in other languages. Searching the web for equivalent words and phrases, I've managed to find most of the phrases I needed and also found a number of Spanish-language gamesites to use as a pattern for mine.

For now, I'm testing the game with a 'Technology Demo' that has all of the features enabled both to track down bugs as well as identify those elements that players will favor. Thus, as I prepare for a commercial release I'll have a better idea what 'works' and what is and isn't adding to the immersion. A handful of my mods aren't ready for network prime-time yet so I'll be chasing them down in the coming weeks as I prepare an 'Alpha' release that will have the gametypes and other features fully functional. I've done some extreme mods to AFX, stripping out much of the RPG functionality and turning it into an 'FPS with RTS elements'. Not all of my changes held up to network play, but the 'OOOH - AHHH' factor for the bits that work, such as afxWeapons and afxVehicles is very, very high.

I've also had to finally get around to finishing the game website. Funny how it is, we Torquers have no problems bashing source code all day, yet when it comes down to simple html/css we usually don't spend as much effort tweaking. Unfortunately, the web is where the public will see and purchase the results of our amazing source code, so there's another place to spend precious time. I had to dust off my ancient G4 that has Dreamweaver installed to get the website working, and while it too is really only a tech demo, I now at least have something to showoff not only to friends and colleagues, but to potential investors and collaborators as well. I intend to use crowdsourcing to help with funding, but want to have playable game to offer to investors and compel them to 'show me that money'...

So for now, here's the site:

TolTech

I'll be doing major updates almost daily, and will post progress as I can...