All I Want For Christmas

As an update from my last post, let me say that I successfully put my student loans into forbearance for the next six months. That means I don't have to pay on it until May! So now I have just enough money to get my wife and I a decent Christmas AND pay the rent!

Anyway, I haven't really worked on the projects much, I spent too much time retro-gaming with the emulator I've got on my Xbox. I've almost beat Actraiser, and I'm farther than I've ever been on Flashback. It's been way too long since a really great game came out, and from playing those oldies, it makes me want a new one more and more. Which brings me to the subject of the day! All I want for Christmas is a Nintendo Wii, which is feels seemingly less and less likely as the days go on. Another thing is that the game I really want, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, seems to be hard for people to find, to the extend of selling them online for $100! Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait, even until after Christmas if necessary.

Not Enough Money, Not Enough Time

As some may know, I attended school at Full Sail Real World Education where I got a Bachelor of Science Degree in Game Design and Development. Well, now my loan repayment has started and it's really stressing me out. Let's just say, the payment went through and now I'm in the hole.

Luckily my wife, Tasheana, got a job because now we might actually be able to pay the payments. At any rate, I'm hoping to put the loans into forbearance so I can pay them later, while I save up in the short run.

As far as the game progress on HERO goes, I haven't really worked on it a whole lot recently. We finally got our first server (my mom's old PC) but now I actually have to set it up. I was hoping to get a static IP for it but I think it may cost too much money to justify. Anyway, when the server gets up and running, the other programmer on the team should start working on his stuff for the game and we might be smelling bread soon!

I am also working on a different project, codename Guardian. I've automated a lot of the Ogre3D setup so it's a little easier to get things working. Hopefully this project won't detract me too much from the first project, but I've really been dying to make this project for so long.

The Hero Project

Well it has been a long time, but I'm finally going to start writing in this thing again. Over the past few months I've made quite a bit of progress considering how often I actually work on the game. Ogre3D is a great rendering engine, and I plan to incorporate it when I create the proprietary game engine I will use for most projects from here on out. But for this project we decided to use the Wraith Engine, courtesy of NinjaBee/Wahoo Studios.

As far as the game is concerned, we are displaying a partial front end where you can create a game that generates a random map. The game board supports static props of irregular sizes (for bookshelves, tables and the like) hopefully to be extended to interactive props soon. Also there is support for characters with full animations and actions, such as attacking.

That's about it for the Hero Project. I guess it would be appropriate for me to say that the game is a board game similar to the old Hero Quest board game. Hopefully I can get a server up soon so the other programmer on the team can help me out with some stuff.

Torque and Ogre3D battle to the death

Well it's been decided that we will not use the Torque Game Engine for our current project. Although Torque is a great engine and allows for some cool things, it's not feasible for me to learn TorqueScript and the architecture of Torque. The scope of this game engine is just too much.

Instead, we have turned to a freeware 3D Rendering Engine called Ogre3D, which, despite the incredible amount of time I took getting it to compile and run, seems to be our best option. Yesterday I was able to start a project from scratch using all the dll's and Ogre source code and also started on the tutorials they have on their site.

Hopefully we have made the right decision in our choice of middleware, since now we only have a 3D Rendering Engine we still need things for networking and physics, but I've got some ideas for those.

Getting to know Torque

Well it's been a few days, but not much has happened. I have been looking over the Torque documentation, Developer Network, forums, tutorials, and sample code trying to get a feel for the engine. It is now up for question whether the project we were thinking of doing with the Torque engine will be as feasible as a few other ideas we have.

Anyway, I have been referencing another person in this project so I guess it's time to introduce him. His website is www.darkmount.net and he is my brother. He is a 3D Modeler so it is quite a deadly combination for us to be making games. Projects have been in the planning stage for a while now, and finally, we're both up to the skill level necessary to actually start one.

In a few days I will start modifying the actual Torque engine in preparation for our game and I will definitely post the progress on this blog.

First Blog

Hello everyone, this is my first blog. Currently, I am writing this post just to see how it all works. This blog will be all about things that come to my mind as well as progress in any project I am working on.

Yesterday I bought the Torque Game Engine and played around with that. As far as I know I made a bit of progress just getting a new project set up. Now, after work today, I will start working with the engine making little test projects to get used to the whole thing. Wish me luck! Now it's back to work for me!