Game Dev School Video game design & development articles

Austin, TX is going to be home to the inaugural Texas Independent Game Conference coming up July 22-23, 2006. I only just saw an announcement for this, so I don't know much about it yet other than what you'll find yourself by visiting their site. The keynote speakers are announced to be Warren Spector and Greg Costikyan, which is a good start. Early registration is $90 which is pretty cheap (price of a couple programming books, eh?)

The program looks to cover roughly this:

I need to get back to other work, but I wanted to post a quick follow-up about the whole 3D architecture/building content creation tool "problem" I'm having. I noted that Garage Games' Torque Constructor was getting nearer to reality -- as it's gone into beta -- which pushed me ever so slightly further into researching other tools available to create interiors for 3D games (notably for Torque since I'm playing with that these days.)

I've used the aforementioned QuArK most recently, but I honestly didn't get too far into it. At the time I was furthest into this stuff, I was lacking a project to keep me focussed. Right now, I'm in "research mode" so I will be trying to find as many tools as I can... in this case, for creating "levels" and/or buildings and interiors for levels. I won't go into the distinction of terms right now, sorry. :P

So... I'm wanting to point out another tool that I hadn't pointed out in my post: Cartography Shop appears to do much (all?) of what is needed for creating architecture for 3D game levels. It's pretty inexpensive, but I'm not personally going to commit until I find out more about Constructor's pricing/availability.

It also appears (from posts by Garage Games employees) that these guys aren't working directly with GG on specific Torque integration or whatever. That doesn't make it less of a worthy product (I haven't tried it yet, but there is a demo,) but it does affect my decisions if I end up going with Torque for future development. In fact, just to give you more to read if you're looking in the same direction, I'm seeing the Torque Pipeline for Cartography Shop as a possible resource for using CS for TGE. Again, this isn't an endorsement, nor have I found all the options in this space... this is just where my research landed so far. Fun, isn't it? Please add comments about other options if you know of them... please? :)

If you're doing non-TGE stuff, or if you need a something besides the other free tools now, you might find this sucker to be what you need/want. Heck, you might find this program to be excellent... in which case, you should be posting comments here so the rest of us know how it is!! :)

Here's a blurb from the Torque Pipeline page that sums up basically why I'm on this journey to discover alternatives:

If you tried to use QuArK and found it to be difficult to setup much less use for mapping on a daily basis, the Cartography Shop + Torque Pipeline combo is what you need. Yes QuArK is free and we can't beat that price, but is your time really free? Can you afford to battle the tools while you try to build that next complex building for you game? Torque Pipeline fully supports all the major capabilities of the DIF format in a simple to use package that won't frustrate you or hamper your creativity.

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.

Well... I spoke too soon, I think. Yay for testing! (or lack thereof?)

I'm leaving the Sourcebook in place for now, but I'm trying out an actual wiki module to see if it works better than the book module I started with. I am just getting a sense of confusion trying to work with the content as it was, so I'm looking at alternatives.

Continue reading here if you want to see the original post, but don't consider the Sourcebook "live" for now. Sheesh. :P

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. :)

Another of my favorite sessions at the GDC '06 was titled How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days. It was somewhat of a followup on the previous years' GDC presentation about the initial Experimental Gameplay Project since the fantastic session brought about such a slew of "how are you making these games so quickly?" questions from the crowd.

For one thing, the Experimental Gameplay Project is the source of an immense amount of fun. There are a ton of great and crappy games on that site from the project's entrants. It's a terrific, incredible, amazing resource to see how some other innovative game designers think. Anyway, back on topic...

The EGP folks posted the slides from the session, if you'd like to check it out... honestly, start by reading the above-linked Gamasutra article before sapping 50MB from the EGP servers, eh? Only snag that puppy if you're really interested in seeing more.

At any rate, I highly recommend reading up on this session as it's a great view into the minds of some rapid-prototyping game designers.

This is very, very interesting to me... an animation studio in Amsterdam, Orange has been working on an animated short film using as much open source software/tools as they can, like Blender. That's neat and all, but what's gotten me jazzed is that the whole thing is going to be released as Creative Commons open content! Sweeet. That means (in case you don't want to read up on that link,) that they'll release "all of our production files, 3D models, textures, animation... for you to inspect and use however you please." Gah!c

For those of you who are aspiring 3D artists or even film makers/directors, I hope you can see what an incredible potential resource this would be! Imagine having all the 3D scenes, textures, animation scripts, etc. from an entire animated short film to play with! No more wondering "how'd they do that?"... just open up the files and find out!

If there's a catch, it's that you have to buy the extended edition DVD to get this content, but that shouldn't stop you. They deserve at least that much money to help support their efforts for opening up all this great content for people. As of this writing, the movie has already been premiered but the DVD isn't quite done yet. You can preorder Elephants Dream here for now.

Well... just thought you'd like to know about that project! :)

I'm reacquainting myself with Blender, so I thought I'd point you folks towards it in case you're not familiar. If you haven't seen it yet (or if it's been a while), Blender 3D has matured over the years as a terrific tool for creating 3D content. Modeling, animation, rendering and even realtime 3D/game creation using the built-in tools. That's a lot of stuff (and buzz-words for those of you new to 3D lingo).

My recent interest in the program has been spurred by the financial strain of having to upgrade all my content creation tools yet again... it's so stinkin' expensive for a small dev shop! Well, Blender is very powerful and free... free. Nummy.

One thing I'm going to play with real soon is the exporter for creating DTS models for the Torque Game Engine. I had heard about it a long time ago, but didn't have time then to play with it. Using Blender to create Torque 3D content provides a fantastic low-cost solution for indie developers and definitely for schools on a tight budget, I think.

I'm not going to go into a review of the product here since I'm not really qualified (game design is my forte, not 3D content creation as much,) but I do use the tool on occasion. Maybe I'll dive back in in full force and really learn the newer features of Blender and get more adept at using it.

For now, if you want more information, you'll just have to run over there and do your own reasearch! :)

"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.