Weekly Blog Entry

Alright, this is my official blog entry for the week. Up to this point I haven't been doing much besides turning out conceptual drawings for our characters, terrain and vehicles. I've taken only the briefest of glances at the Torque Game Engine, and just last night tested out the exporting of Torque's dts format files out of Maya. That turned out to be a bit easier than I feared. Although the process is still somewhat technical and finicky, so I'm sure there are a number of things that can and probably will go horribly wrong at some point.

But of course this is nothing compared to the technical mastery that our game mechanics will require. The Torque editing environment itself is pretty sparse in terms of functions, so much of the work will have to be done outside of it in the console and in text files.

Fortunately, I won't have to understand all of it. Most of my time from here on should go into models, textures, GUI and possible cinematics & radio chatter animations. It is quite a lot of content though, and I'm not entirely sure if we should model my character designs or just make very basic 2D animations (or even static pics). Actually, for all I know at this point the whole radio chatter & story cinematics may prove too much on our constrained schedule, making it all a moot point.

I'm sure I'll have a much better idea of where this is all headed by the end of the day, and I may continue on this official posting later in the evening.