Sorry no updates recently... I'm really swamped with a sudden project dropped in my lap. I'll try to get something up this week, but more likely next week.

Thanks for stopping by, though! :P

Totally pointless post here, but certainly someone else will find this funny...

Penny Arcade - "That Infernal Industry"

Okay, my brain is swimming in too much information right now... I wanted to post something about this bit of research, but I've still got a lot of reading to do before a solid, discussable perspective coagulates. For now, you might just want to start some research alongside mine and see where it takes you. I'll talk more about what I'm seeing later. Here's the deal real quick:

Garage Games has announced that their Constructor project has hit the beta phase. Torque Constructor is a ".map (as in the .map file format) editing and .dif (the Torque interior file format) producing program" for creating 3D content for the Torque 3D engine. It might also work for creating content for anything that uses .map, but I'm not sure yet -- like I said, I'm still underway on this voyage. If you've been using Valve's Hammer, GtkRadiant or maybe QuArK to do some level editing, you might be right on board, too... if you don't know what any of those are, you have more research to do! :P

If that's enough to pique your interest, you really ought to shoot over and start reading. Great stuff! There's a great batch of links on that post that will get you well on the way to understanding more about Constructor.

Also, that blog post serves as a fantastic introduction to concave vs. convex models, specifically how they are treated in Torque, but it's a great read for any 3D game artist, I think.

SketchUp is a 3D content creation tool that is promoted as "3D for Everyone." It's touted as very easy to learn, yet powerful... I don't yet know if this is true since I'm still not getting around to trying it. Soon, I hope. I need to see what this sucker is like. Anyway... they've announced the release of a SketchUp plugin for Google Earth that has me very, very interested.

I posted an article on another site of mine about the Metaverse Roadmap Project and I brought up a few concepts floating around about the potential of Google's acquisition (recently) of SketchUp as possibly being the first steps toward a virtually navigable Google Earth with 3D content. I'm not too sure how close this gets us to actual avatar-centric navigation of Google Earth, but this obviously (to me) proves the concept is well underway... in some form.

If you don't get what I'm talking about -- especially since I'm not really explaining anything too well -- go snag Google Earth and check out the example links on the SketchUp announcement page linked above. I think it's pretty stinkin' cool! Add a bit of gravity and WASD controls and you could be walking around in these environments! Neat.

So, let's look at this from a game dev research perspective:

Maybe there's some potential in a company like Google working with someone like Virtools, Adobe (ie: Macromedia's Shockwave tech) or one of the many other web 3D technology companies to create an API or toolset for generating online virtual spaces using the Google Earth data.

Maybe I'm just dreaming?

I've played around with projects like the now-defunct Adobe Atmosphere project (random review and community site link) and it seems like a really interesting technology to harness in the creation of at least simple virtual spaces based on real-world locations.

Well... I'm mostly tagging this info here since it is my personal research blog. I'm done talking about this right now. If you want to think more about it or discuss it, please do so. For now, I need to get back to real work. I'll look into this some other day. :)

"Agile Software Development" is a development method that pushes for many iterations and increments to the product instead of a more pre-design based production. Agile methods have proven to be very effective in many software development projects due to the ability to increment features based on immediate needs instead of holding true to a design document written before all the variables/problems/needs were known. This lends itself very nicely to game design, as it turns out, especially since you don't always know what's going to be fun until you actually create it and play it. With some types of software, Agile doesn't clearly make sense since you may know exactly what the software must do and you just need to set out to create it. Very few (if any?) video game designs remain unchanged from early design to ship day.

Agile is rather difficult for me to explain in a paragraph since I'm rather new to the concepts myself. Here's a great blurb from the Agile Software Development website that starts the topic off very nicely:

...Agile Methodology focuses on an iterative and incremental approach to the creation of games.

Most games are developed in phases...a design phase is followed by a prototype phase, followed by production and then an Alpha/Beta phase at the end. This approach assumes that if we create a big document and plan and develop to that plan, we can create a game that not only meets its budget, schedule and scope, but also be fun.

My experience has been that we don't really answer the important questions with documents. The only real proof of the value of your design idea is the actual running game. Since we really don't see the game running until the end (when it's too late to change our design), the quality of the game suffers. Not only that, but the uncertainty in budget and schedule leads to chronic crunch time.

If you'd like a more core view of Agile methods, maybe the Agile Manifesto principles can help guide you more... maybe it just confuses things.

Well, here's why I like the idea of Agile... I love prototypes! I actually have a lot of complete game design ideas that are almost only prototypes to bigger development studios in that they only serve the purpose of providing a single, focused play experience. There was a lot of talk this year at GDC about prototypes, mainly revolving around Spore since it is known to be extremely prototype-driven in its development and design. In fact, it turns out that almost everything created for last years' incredible Spore demo by Will Wright at GDC '05 (you MUST watch that, IMO, even if there's a lot missed from another slide screen not shown), and even the subsequent demos at that years' E3 Expo... were essentially very advanced prototypes! They have since started from scratch (essentially) to create the game based on what they learned from all those prototypes/testing! Wow. Not many projects are built this way, mostly because of the pressure from publishers to ship the game, and such gunk like that... money, time, etc.

So this all leads me to value the prototypes again, and it seems to put my path squarely on track with Agile Game Development as one of the most viable development options for me. I'll dig into it further and see how it goes, but it looks really interesting... and exciting.

I'm also going to subscribe to the Agile Game Development Blog, I think. There's some great info in there and I think it will help motivate me on how to use these methods better. I'll add that blog's feed to Game Dev School, too... I think I'll be talking about this stuff more! Nice.

The quest for a new (for me) game development platform continues for me. I've been using Macromedia Flash (someday, I'll just give in and call it Adobe Flash or whatever... not today) and some Director/Shockwave to make games for the past 1.5 years. The main two projects during that time involved the need to deliver on PC, Mac and online... hard to ignore the validity of Flash as the tool of choice here, eh?

The thing is... I want to do something bigger in the future and I'm not sure Flash cuts it. Director is certainly better for bigger projects, for the most part... better performance, arguably better support for large data handling, cheaper multiplayer support (for now), etc. Flash is catching up in a lot of ways and Director is falling behind in other ways... I'm just getting antsy to try something else. There are many options, but here's one I'm targeting for further review:

I've put a lot of effort into learning about Garage Games' Torque Game Engine in the past. I've had a license for TGE since around 2003 and it's very sweet. The thing is, it's recently gotten immensely sweeter due to recent movement by GG toward making the XBox 360 another platform you can potentially deliver content on!(!!!) Yeah, that's right, it's possible to make a game in TGE (more acurately, Torque Shader Engine, I think, TSE,) and a path exists to create the game for delivery on Xbox Live Arcade! Suhweeet.

Now, it's not free since there are special licensing fees involved, but it's still not very expensive considering what it's typically cost to make a game for a console. The biggest excitement for me is that I can play around with TGE for my $100, move into TSE if I decide to continue development and only when I think I have a solid game for the 360, begin the push in that direction using the same core game code!

Seriously, it's got me frickin' stoked! It's not easy, but the potential set in front of me (and us) is astounding to me. I hadn't put much thought into developing on a console for many years, considering I didn't command a few million bucks minimum. Now, I'm starting to consider it something plausible to target.

I'll point out the technology a little more later, but for now, the above links can get you started on the path to learning more about Torque and what Garage Games is doing to support Indie development. Yay.

One last point about GG's products: their 2D game kit implementations of the TGE tech are really sweet. I'm looking very seriously at the Torque Game Builder also, which is the product formerly called "Torque 2D" I think. It's looking more and more viable as a 2D game dev platform, especially given their new level/map editors they introduced at GDC. This might just be a platform I start developing some 2D games on instead of just Flash all the time.

We'll see...

I think this will be a Good Thing, but I'm not sure what the best implementation of it could be... I'm opening up a sub-set of my blog called Hoza's Game Design Research Journal. For now, until I find a better method, this is really just part of my blog posts, but under a category with this formal name (which is just a sub-cat of my blog.)

Basically, I do a bunch of research about video game design stuff nearly all the time -- well, "design" in general, since I see most of life as a game, not just the "video" part! ;) Since I'm almost constantly thinking about games and design, it leads me down a lot of different paths of research (or "research" as it were, since much of it is so informal as to be considered wandering more than hard research.) I have struggled to find a central location to record my progress and findings... I think this medium might be at least one answer to that. Yay, if so.

Let me introduce why I want to do this in these pages...

Research has been somewhat of a passion of mine for as long as I remember. I've been a "tinkerer" in the physical world -- building stuff and dismantling neat things to find out how they work -- and that seems to have bled over to my game and online endeavors. I like to find out about new technology and such, even though I may only barely understand whatever it is. Just knowing that something exists might be enough to trigger a nifty game design or even a little widget to include in a game. It's a behavior that got me to refer to myself as a "Knowledge Sponge" since I can't seem to satiate this need to explore information. Fun for a geek, it is.

So this year at the GDC, Will Wright (I'll talk about him a LOT, but I'll introduce him to you later if you don't know him yet) gave a wonderful presentation where he talked a lot about how research -- and lots of it -- played a large part in his game design world. I talked about this briefly in a post on MassMOG.com, but I think you're seeing here in my journal a more concrete example of the impact of that talk for me.

I hope this journal will inspire me to formalize my research at least a little bit... well, not "formal" per se, but if I treat the journal as a companion in this journey, it might just enrich the whole experience of research for me. Maybe I'll inspire someone else too, which would serve the point of the site nicely, of course.

Oh yeah... and these ideas will all be searchable and I can browse them much easier than if I wrote them in my books and such... considering my blatant lack of technology use at home. Searching is nice.

Well, I'll let you go now since I'm most definitely babbling at this point. Please let me know if you like this idea and DEFINITELY let me know if you found it useful or inspiring at some point!

Thanks again for visiting! (I've been saying that a lot lately. :)

Hoza