Week, er, 21 -- More more TGB

Wow, I totally forgot to blog last week. Huh.

The last two weeks, I studied behaviors and tile maps, which both look like they'll be extremely useful. Behaviors let you conveniently attach a set of properties and callback handlers to any scene object. The main benefit seems to be the callbacks. The behavior namespace can implement lots of the normal scene object callbacks, so you can have a bunch of different handler functions all getting called, one for each behavior and one for the object itself. The upshot is kind of like multiple inheritance.

Tile maps are for creating levels that are built of lots of repeating grid squares (think Mario or any other older game). Just got started with them, but they already look very useful. You can assign various properties to each tile beyond just the image, which has interesting possibilities.

Anyhow, these last two weeks were good in that I felt that my TGB study was actually worth the delay. But it's high time to start putting the actual game together. Tile maps are the last main feature I wanted to study, so I'll study a few miscellaneous classes briefly and then get on with the main project.

Week 19 -- More Torque

Cruising along on learning TGB. I learned GUIs pretty well, and I think they'll probably be useful for the game. The highlight was learning a neat trick to show any scene objects as part of a GUI, which at first I didn't think you could do. You create a t2dSceneWindow in your GUI the size of whatever scene elements you want to display. Then you create a new scenegraph (or I suppose you could use part of your main level), arrange your elements, and set your mini-window's camera to cover what you want to show. This is the detailed tutorial where I found this.

I also covered some smaller things: mouse handling, mounting objects, timers, and paths. Everything's going well. Paths took some trial and error to figure out, as the included documentation says nothing about the path functions. Eventually I found a better reference on the TGB wiki.

Indeed, the biggest frustration for me has been that it's hard to find materials for learning TGB as a beginner. I've found a lot of good things by now, but it's often been just chance browsing on the forums or searching on the wiki. There are several different "reference" sections that all have varying information. I'm happy figuring things out through experimentation, but I wish it were easier to find basic information for getting started. Maybe that'll be my next GarageGames post.

Week 18 (!) -- Torquey Torque

Regular posting resuming in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ....

And we're back. I've been getting a bit of work in learning my way around TGB better. Did some with changing levels and controlling the camera. I found that you can make several distinct areas in the same level file and set camera limits so the camera doesn't slide over to the next area. I'm not sure whether it's better to make one big level for all similar areas or to make a separate level file for each area.

A bit of study on object layering. Figured out how to set up the layer sorting so that it'll come out right for a three-quarters view (meaning that objects in front are drawn in front).

And am currently learning TGB GUIs and the GUI Builder. This part is going better than I expected from my initial experience. It seems pretty powerful and usable so far.

I'll probably skip some of my planned study topics and return to the main project sooner than planned to help out the schedule.

I don't want to go in the cart

No, I'm not dead, and neither is the project. However, between family matters, busyness, and general lack of motivation, I haven't gotten anything done lately. I hope to have better news soon.

Week 12 -- Be more studious!

Nothing interesting to report this week. Just working on learning TGB and TorqueScript as planned. I've been somewhat unmotivated (and distracted by Puzzle Pirates), but it's going OK. I think I understand datablocks now. It seems that they may be useful for making a class hierarchy of enemies, for example, but only for data. There doesn't seem to be full class polymorphism in Torque, unless I'm missing something; you can assign a class and a superclass to each object, but can't actually define a class hierarchy.

So things aren't very exciting right now, but I think it's a good step to take. I'm basically learning how to use my toolbox before I try to build the house.

Week 11 -- Regrouping

That's me regrouping, not something happening in the game. Between being very busy at work and some family matters, I did very little on the project over the last week.

I've realized that it would be very easy for me to spend an endless amount of time learning TGB, and let the project die without even realizing it. "It's OK, I'm learning Torque. I can get back to work on the main project any time." So to avoid that, I'm going to follow a strict schedule and list of what I'm going to learn, and it's focused on the most important things that I'll need to know.

And I'm going to post it right here to help hold myself accountable (and it may be interesting for anyone else in a similar situation):

	Est. hours	Task	Notes
2		datablocks
2		moving between levels
2		layers	and getting objects to sort well in a three-quarters view
1		object groups
4		GUIs and GUI Builder
2		object pathing
2		camera movement	and following an object
2		behaviors
2		mounting objects
1		timers
1		mouse input
1		t2dSceneObject
2		tile maps
1		SimObject
1		SimSet
1		t2dPath
1		t2dSceneGraph
1		t2dTextObject
4		Misc class/function experimentation

(Sorry for the ugly formatting on the tables, can't take time to fix it.)

And the upcoming part of my schedule, for good measure:

Start date	End date	Hours	Task	Notes
09/19/2007	10/13/2007	33	learn TorqueScript/TGB
10/14/2007	10/28/2007	24	core battle system	attack, magic, tech, shield, knock-back, wait time
10/29/2007	11/02/2007	6	basic navigation	move b/w areas
11/03/2007	11/13/2007	16	dialogue/narration and events
08/21/2007	11/15/2007	24	all content for intro	introductory area / “first five minutes”
11/16/2007	11/28/2007	16	character ability up, change equipment
11/29/2007	12/06/2007	11	allies + basic AI
12/07/2007	12/09/2007	4	passive abilities
12/10/2007	12/13/2007	8	enchantments	basic/instant only for now
12/14/2007	12/17/2007	6	generate enemy groups
11/16/2007	12/20/2007	24	content for first major area

Between falling behind and adding time for studying TGB/TorqueScript, my schedule has slipped about 6 weeks from the original plan. That's sobering. It looks likely that my final product for the contest will have to be only part of the full plan for the game. If so, I'll definitely go for a more polished but shorter portion rather than longer but unpolished. We'll see how it goes from here.

Week 10 -- Special attacks, varied enemies

Last week: Lots of fun with my battle system prototype, and a change of plans.

I added two special attacks (you build up to a special attack by hitting the enemies with normal attacks or your fire spell) and a couple of small touches (enemies bounce back when they run into you, etc.).

So I was finished with my originally planned features for the prototype, but not satisfied. I decided that I need to make it more interesting to be able to evaluate whether the ideas are really going to work. So I added multiple enemy types. We now have: normal, physical (resists physical attacks), spitting (fires projectiles, which you can block with your shield -- oh yeah, I added that too), magical (resists magic, fires spells at you), and tough (fast, hits harder). This was a lot of fun. My eventual goal here is to test out throwing a variety of battle situations at the player and hopefully require different approaches.


(Illustration: special attack 1, which knocks the enemies way back. You can also see a brown enemy shot and the end of a dead-enemy-go-poof animation, which was one of the details I added mostly for fun. Remember: placeholder art!)

I've added a couple of things that are more polished than what you might expect from a prototype, but they're all things that I'll need to do eventually and wanted to learn. For instance, I added a charge-up meter for spellcasting, which was fun -- and helpful for verifying that the spellcasting state handling was working properly. And now that I have multiple enemy types, I need to make it pick a group of opponents to meet a given total "challenge level," which is something I'll need to do in the real game too.

I continue to feel that I don't know TGB and TorqueScript nearly as well as I need to, so I'm rethinking my schedule. I'm afraid that if I try to start on the full game now, I'll make bad design decisions and waste a lot of time. I strongly suspect that I implemented the multiple enemy types prototype poorly. So I've decided to step back and take a couple of weeks to learn TGB better, the various builders and key features such as datablocks. I'll probably try to incorporate the things I learn into the battle prototype or other mini-prototypes to keep my morale up. My hope is that the time I spend on this now will pay for itself in faster and more maintainable development in the end.