TorqueX and Artists.

With the start of the new semester, Matt and I have been discussing possibly working on another game. Now that we have some experience with XNA and have a pretty good idea of what not to do (See the postmortems), we might just be ready. Not to mention GarageGames is holding a competition for indie developers which ends in February.

One of the other groups in our game design class decided to use GarageGames' TorqueX engine, and they had by far the most polished looking game. Given our short time line for this project (a little more than 3 weeks after the semester begins) an engine is definitely looking like the way to go. The hope is that instead of spending most of that time programming the game we will be able to test the game mechanics early on. If we can avoid spending time writing code that someone else is providing for free, why not take advantage of it?

I can foresee two possible problems with this. First, any new technology takes time to adopt. We may understand XNA, but we are going to have to learn how to use TorqueX. To help mitigate this we are going to look into bringing one of the students who used TorqueX for their game into our team.

The second possible problem is the engine itself may limit what we do. For example, have you ever seen a web site made using Frontpage? Chances are, it looks very similar to 99% of web pages made with Frontpage. We need to be wary that our game does not become a generic TorqueX game.

Matt and I both touched on the topic of using "programmer art." Wolfgang has shown us that if we are going to be creating our own art assets, it will be both time consuming and of lower quality. Our strengths are in designing and coding the game, so that is what we should be doing. This time around we are going to try to recruit some outside help. Surely we can find some art majors that would be willing to donate their time and expertise for a nice resume piece.

Bringing in more people means that Matt and I are going to have to have a pretty good idea as to what exactly we are doing. As Matt mentioned, we suffered without a solid design document last semester, and that was with three like minded people. Before we start bringing people into this, we are going to have to have a plan and direction. If everyone has a clear idea as to what they are doing, we shouldn't waste as much time butting heads and stepping on toes.

And version control. This time we HAVE to use version control.