Project Showcase

Here is my random space that I will fill with updates from time to time about things that I'm currently playing around with. There will be vague descriptions, guarded comments, and lots of legal red tape. Occassionally though, I will attempt to put in interesting things like screenshots and the occassional downloadable demo.

Air Locked Revisited

Last updated 12/5/2006
Way back in the day, my first foray into game development was with a multiplayer space RPG I tried to write called "Air Locked". I never finished it, but it's a perennial project that I return to every now and then to experiment with various game theory options or other such things.

Lately, I've been experimenting with the concepts behind cooperative multiplayer gaming. When God wired us for games, I really feel that cooperative gaming was one of the things He had in mind, and I feel a distinct lack of good implementations of that in games today. MMOs of course have great cooperative play, Lego Starwars has fantastic cooperative play, and the Diablo series is right up there as well.

But I feel there could be more. One of the things that bugs me about the camera in Secret of Mana and Lego Starwars is that the camera only zooms out so far, and then you're locked. It can make for frustrating gameplay.

So I decided to experiment with a dynamically zoomable camera in Torque Game Builder. For that, I returned to my perennial project of Air Locked, and in an evening or two had learned enough to get a camera that updates itself to track all of the players on the screen. I think it's pretty neat!

I took some more evenings to learn how to do some AI, and spent a fair bit of time poring over equations in Wikipedia's Torpedo Data Computer entry (which was incredibly helpful).

I finally got some AI that uses trig properly to lead targets accurately, and I must say I think I understand why games like Escape Velocity didn't do this -- it's quite tough at times!

But I persevered and prevailed. Here's a screenshot:


And even more than this, I invite you all to
Download the game!

And if that's not enough, you don't just get a screenshot, you don't just get an unrestricted downloadable binary, but you also get the source code! Of course I retain my rights to that code, but please feel free to use any of it that you would like (graphics included), including raw copy/paste for anything that might be useful to you. Credit attribution is appreciated, but certainly not necessary.

Cheers! Feedback is very welcome and appreciated. Watch this space for more info on these games.

(P.S. Is there a sort of blog module we can have for GGE so that when I update this, I don't have to trash everything I wrote here?)

• Christian Coders Network
• Christian Game Developer's Conference
• A Miracle of Science (my favorite webcomic)