Mad Rantz

As I previously mentioned, I am starting work on a two-player game I’m calling Duello for now. I added a hotseat option to the Checkers demo that came with T2D and now I’m ready to start prototyping. I love prototyping. Love it, love it, love it. Did I mention that I love it?

I have some code from my Bethellowed prototype that fits in well with the direction of Deullo, but before I start coding up a storm I thought it might be a good idea to write up my design thoughts. In the past I would have created a private blog and started detailing my thoughts, typically with separate entries for topics, and then edited the entries as I got my head around the design. However, I noticed a little link on Jeff’s blog for a free Wiki and thought - hey, now that’s a damned fine idea, I think I’ll check that out, thank you very much.

I’ve been aware of Wiki for a good long while now, but I never bothered to mess with it. I gave sessions at the IndieGamesCon in the past on remote team collaboration, and I have no idea why I excluded Wiki, as it is a great tool for remote teams. It beats forums for sure.

Now I have a nice public location to dump my thoughts on Duello - the MR Love Palace Wiki! Currently it is just a place for me to spew design for the game, but I love brainstorming game design, so if anyone out there has an interest at any time on the game feel free to let me know and I’ll let you access the brainstorming section of the Wiki.

It’s been a while since I’ve messed with Torque or T2D, and it shows. I’m toying around with a 2-player game idea, and the latest beta of T2D has a nice little checker game that is perfect as a starting point for my idea. It has the concept of 2-players - check, it has a game board - check, it has pieces that can be selected and moved - check. Good stuff.

So, the first thing I decide to tackle is something pretty simple. I don’t want to have to spark up two computers running the game while I’m developing it, so I really want a hot-seat option. The final game I imagine would also benefit from a hot-seat option, so I get a two-fer on this one. I didn’t want to break or re-architect the current 2-player code that is in the checkers demo, so i make a few small changes, and wa-la - hot-seat is in.

Well, sort of.

For some reason after I put in my changes the piece was not only drawn next to my mouse pointer as I was moving it, but the first time I moved a piece it also left it’s image behind in the square it started in. So I thought - hey, here’s a good opportunity to break out a work-in-progress TorqueScript editor called Torsion and do a little script debugging. I download it from the folks at Sickhead, set up a project in it, and hit F5 to debug, and wa-la - debugging is on.

Well, sort of.

For some reason, the game doesn’t actually ever finish coming up in the debugger. Instead, it hangs right after it parses the command line arguments. No errors, nada. I check the forums on GarageGames and find that a couple other people are having similar trouble, but the fella at Sickhead isn’t seeing the problem on his end, which makes it tough to figure out the fix.

In the end I decide that I’m likely just messing up some client/server code and that’s what is causing my original problem. However, now I’m ready to go to bed, so that will have to wait for another night.

Nothing like a solid, productive night of tinkering.

Well, sort of…