Technical difficulties

Phase 1
As I mentioned in my last post, I have been working on this game for about two years. The first year was spent hashing out details of the story while a programmer friend worked to build a game engine from scratch.

Difficulties arose when it became apparent that this approach was, well, insane, so we (along with my brother and another friend) raided our piggy banks and pooled together $25 each for an indie license of the Torque Game Engine. Thus ended phase 1.

Phase 2
With an impressive list of features that seemed to promise everything we could want (weather and particle effects, blended animations, a terrain editor and GUI editor), Torque promised to kick our game into a new gear. Despite Torque's quirkiness and steep learning curve, I slogged away, implementing many of our gameplay ideas on the little blue box man included with the engine.

Difficulties arose, again, when it became apparent that Torque's long list of features had some rather large holes, and filling them would require major changes to the source code (also included with the engine as a "feature").

Then I remembered reading about a Mac-based game engine called Unity. Having passed over it a year ago because it lacked some things needed for an RPG like ours (a terrain editor, a GUI editor, and a Windows client for my programmer friend), I gave it another look and discovered that the imminent release of Unity 2.0 will include both terrains and a GUI editor, not to mention a host of capabilities (and flat-out better design) that Torque only pretended to offer. Being a Mac owner, I took the plunge. Thus ended phase 2.

Phase 3
This blog officially marks the beginning of phase 3. I'm rolling along with Unity, awaiting my free upgrade to 2.0. I have created my very own blue box man for testing and am quickly catching up to where I left off with Torque. No doubt there are more technical difficulties ahead, but for now, things are good.