Since I've been back in the saddle in August, I've been plugging away with Game Maker Pro; working on concepts that I've had for a while. What Game Maker has done for me has been largely making a very simple scripting engine that allows me to throw ideas at in a Java-like concept, and have it all work as expected. It's been refreshing and a large case as to what got me back into making things again after the long needed rest of Gauge's demise. Using the very simple concepts that makes the core of Game Maker's logic, I've been able to quickly build simple AI routines, create sound path finding algorithms, and try my hand at something that I need way more experience with: procedural generation. I think with continued time and effort I may have at least something playable, that I hope is worthwhile. The few I have shared some of the designs I have been plugging away at have really liked what they have heard, and some have even let me try the idea with them in a tabletop setting. As such, being able to get this into a medium that actually makes sense has me incredibly excited, and has made me realize just how finding the right toolset and workflow can make a world of difference in the moral in a project, and, thus, the progress that can continually be made.

As things start coming together more and more, I'll be sure to share more details and the nitty gritty.

Over the weekend I participated in Edmonton’s first foray into the Global Game Jam which is a gathering of game developers, artists and sound and music engineers in an attempt to create a game from conception to completion in the span of roughly 48 hours. Needless to say, it’s a hell of a weekend from start to finish as you desperately try to get that last piece of art or that important line of code into the final project. I want to go through the process of the project myself and my group, some of the people from Gauge Entertainment, went through.

Sparing the trivial details of actually getting to the event and first impressions, I went with the guys at Gauge with their game idea. They wanted to make a game that I can best describe as the flash game Toss the Turtle but with a high-tech sniper round, a 3rd person camera, and a final target, which seemed simple enough to at least get something going come Sunday. Now, of course, that ‘something’ would likely turn into just a proof of concept as we opted for a 3D engine for the 3rd person camera as we just did not have enough time to do much more.

Now in out rush to get things started and going we didn’t quite do something that we all realized in hindsight: we never prototyped and as such we dove right into making assets. While that worked out to some degree with our project leader and his modeled bullet with appropriate particle effects, it didn’t quite work out for myself and my quick and dirty materials. Had we aimed at creating the prototype from the beginning I feel we could have coordinated better and ended up with something a bit more representative of the target idea. That said, our final proof wasn’t all bad.

In the end our programmers were able to allow the camera to follow the projectile as it should and give control to the player after firing it. This at least gave a rough outline of how we wanted the game to control and how to build levels according to the variables put in place. Now I can only hope that we continue the project, there’s much we can do to make this a true game.

While elements of textures haven’t been a totally new to me; I’ve put some heavy hours into Photoshop over the years. That said, there’s always been concepts that I could not figure out with other engines. A while back I tried my hand at Unity and while importing base textures to it was a breeze, figuring out how to apply basic bump mapping seemed very out there for one who had just picked up the software and was just now trying to figure out C#. Moving from that to the UDK, especially with Materials taking president over base textures, was worlds better.Materials helped me figure out what I was doing, what I can do and, best of all, how easy it is to get proper texture, detail and specular within the game engine.

This screenshot is of a material I’ve been working on for that second UDK level I showed some screenshots of. The focus was to take a previously created texture (in this case, it was the base of the M_PoolDirt_02_Opt material) and revamp it to match a very wet and well trodden piece of mud. Through both my own tinkering and some help from the gracious 3DBuzz, I was able to reach the target as well as grasp how to implement future materials, all within an afternoon. Compare that to what I ended up doing with Unity: Googling, finding someone who coded a solution and then having to backtrack through someones very very ugly script.

I will keep playing around with the editor, and hopefully I’ll have some more to show of it in the near future.