Dev Day Diary: Back to Basics

Torque 2D continues to impress. Melv, one of the more evil masterminds of the project, released new gravity based objects to the private forums. After some fiddling with XCode (simply because it's completely new turf to me), TorqueScript knew what they were and suddenly my sprites began to behave like that bee screensaver as opposed to a lumbering train.

In a nutshell, that encapsulates why T2D works so well. It's a solid engine backed by some dedicated people who believe in keeping a close proximity to their licensees. Despite being inexpensive - they treat you like you'd expect from the "big guys". Melv's code worked just as expected, allowing me to make the adjustments I needed to get closer to the behaviour I wanted from my game. From engine to developer to game, everything just snapped together. Perhaps this is all still a honeymoon effect, we will see in about two weeks (about then I should have a running demo).

I'm also finding that the more "basic" the game, the more freedom it feels the game design can have. It's odd, you'd think it would be the opposite. But when I removed the multiplayer portion from Unreal Defense Squad, it made everything much easier to think about. Now that I'm not even worrying about 3D - I keep thinking of things which I later decide would be overkill. More technology does mean more possibilities, but it also seems that the more cards you try to stack...

I also got the secret weapon to compile with Torque last night. Now I just have to get it to direct some traffic.