Dave Huston's School Blog

Work is well underway on my independent game project, Space Trader.  Towards this end the very first (rough) version of the Space Trader web page is now online!  Visit http://www.spacetradergame.com to check it out (keep checking back, I'll be improving it greatly over the next few weeks).

In addition to this, my love of blogging has led me to open an additional blog space for news about the project.  You can view this blog by visiting http://spacetraderdave.spaces.live.com. 

Please keep visiting both of these new sites and look for an initial release of the game soon!

Feedback is good.  Feedback is awesome.  Feedback is essential.

Lack of feedback is detrimental to a project.

Lately, I've been spending most of my time working on a project for my T.A. position.  One of our goals is to create a library of documents for students to add to their experience at Brown.  These documents will include tutorials for learning new techniques and procedures, informational for basic reference material, and worksheets, for students to complete on their own for better understanding.

I've been working on this project with my manager, so I've received plenty of feedback through there, as well as from other instructors that I interact with daily who I've shown the work-in-progress to.  This morning, I received my first bit of feedback from an instructor that I don't know as well.  I'm happy to say that it was positive.  Having that kind of positive reinforcement from someone who I respect and am not accustomed to interacting with on a daily basis provides a huge amount of motivation to continue with my work on this project.

In another project, the development of a game with a small group of other students, I've been frustrated by an almost complete lack of feedback.  They continue to seem content to work on projects only during class.  My current task in this group is to write the story for the game.  To that end, I submitted my first outline draft on Friday morning.  I did not receive any feedback at all until Monday afternoon, and I still haven't received feedback from most of the other members of the group. 

I've decided to approach it as we've been taught to treat clients.  I'll submit material to the group, whether they pay attention to it or not, three times before submitting a final draft.  After that's been submitted, final critiques will be accepted.  Critiques regarding points that had been outlined previously will be met with some harsh resistance on the grounds that they had plenty of time to say something before I spent my time writing it up into story or script form.  Comments on the fairness or unfairness of this approach are appreciated.

To do:  I need to get serious work done on my individual game project due at the end of the quarter.  This quarter has gone by deceptively quickly -- we only have 4 weeks left!  4 weeks to build models, textures, and program a game aren't a lot, regardless of how simple the game is or how large your team is.  In my case, it's just me for the actual production of the game (I received some assistance with artwork from an outside contact).  Hopefully, I'll have something playable after this weekend.

Part of my job as a T.A. is to create tutorials, video training modules, and other documentation to help future students.  Naturally, this keeps me on my toes.  Eventually, I intend to put up a website with the tutorials I've produced.

In the meantime, I need to teach myself what ActorX is in 3ds/max...

Link to Gamasutra - Product: GarageGames Announces Torque X For XNA

This is excellent news!  Following the news that Microsoft would be releasing a free edition of XNA Game Studio, and only charging $99 a year for the ability to play your homebrew games on the Xbox 360, GarageGames has now announced the release of their engine specifically for XNA.

What does this mean for me?  The games I'm working on right now will be able to be ported extremely easily over to Xbox 360.  Torque, as an engine, is now poised to take on the big names like Unreal with a huge following of indie developers, and I'm on the front lines with my knowledge of the engine and scripting.

This is going to serve as an excellent motivation for a lot of people to get cracking on those Torque projects!

Windows Live Writer has been released to the public in beta form.  This new program from Microsoft will let you blog directly to Spaces (or any other major blogging site).  I find this nice for being able to post blogs very quickly, even if I'm offline.

Additionally, it makes formatting a bit easier.  Click the link in the name above to download a copy.  It still needs some work, for sure, but it's got most of the basics in place.  Thankfully, it's also somewhat open-source.  The SDK can be had from the same site for developing plug-ins and such.  I'm anxious to see what kind of plug-ins will be developed.