Tuesday 04/10 - More of the same, but different

As the title of this post suggests, today was more of the same. So as we get ourselves settled in and ask the tutor what we were doing today he simply responded with "more of the same I'm afraid, just keep learning Torque". I can't speak for the others here, but personally I was totally fine with this. I had learnt a fair amount during the course of yesterday, but I didn't feel I had learnt quite enough. Today, on the other hand, was a very productive day. I wasn't all that interested in doing the tutorials that come with the engine as I don't feel that they explain everything very well, and as they are written tutorials that go too much into details about unnecessary things it does tend to take a lot more time to complete than it ought to.

With this in mind I set out to search the world wide web for some more intuitive and relevant tutorials, needless to say I came across a very good video tutorial that showed you how to make a simple side scrolling shooter game; which considering we are to use this engine to make our Space Invaders games, it cannot get much more relevant than this.
So most of my day was spent going through these videos starting off with simple things such as adding background and objects (although I did do quite a lot of scripting today, and pretty much straight into it from the first minute of the video). Thankfully as I had done a bit of scripting during my bachelor while making my Crab Attack game, this wasn't too difficult to wrap my head around. Though that's not to say that I understood it all without having to think about it. Hell no, there was times when I was just staring at it trying to make sense of what I had just written; and most of the time I did figure out eventually.

Come 3 o'clock or so and I had been through the whole tutorial and had a nice fun interactive ship that flies through the sky shooting at enemy ships as they fire back at me while passing in the opposite direction (don't worry I have images so you can see what the hell I am talking about):

Let battle commence



ahaaa take that, scumbag!

 yes, I still haven't quite got the hang of placing pictures exactly where I want yet, so they tend to take up unnecessary space. Never mind, aye!?

After I had this working version I decided I wanted some kind of scoring system, and maybe if I had time afterwards I would give the player a set number of lives. Little did I know that mixing between tutorials can be quite confusing as the scripts are not always written in the same way. As I tried to explain my issue to my tutor as he saw that I was just sat there staring at the screen blankly, he reminded me that we are artists and will never need to know how to do this, and that this is what the programmers are here for; to which I happily responded in agreement and instead set out to creating new objects/images to replace the ones being used on there (as these were downloaded from the tutorial website). So I quickly drew a low resolution flying 'super-person' to replace the player ship, and some laser to shoot out of his eyes to replace the rockets. Once I had done all that and replaced the ship and press 'play' to test the level, I suddenly realised that the particle effect I had used to create the thruster effect for the ship was still attached but now looked like it was coming out of my guy's ass... so he's flying through fart power, BRILLIANT!! So afterwards I quickly drew a 'dead guy' image to have every time the player got hit by the enemies and decided to show everyone my brilliant farting superhero that shoots lasers out of his eyes, and then decided that I had ended on quite an up and to end the day there. (I will possibly be working on a better quality to add in tomorrow, as well as making some crazy enemies too).

Here check him out in action...



Fartman 1 on 1, wuh-oh!

Fartman down!

and for those who are interested in how the engine itself looks (though I'm sure non of you even care, and those who do have probably already googled the engine by now) Here's a screenshot:

Torque engine