Sunday, February 22, 2009
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Wow. We've finally got a blog. :) It's been like almost a year already.
Hmm.. what should I talk about? Ah, I'll start with how Liquid Rock happened. :) In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.. oh wait, no that's too far back. Lets fast forward some what. Back like a year ago, both Yap and I met up for lunch. We were working in our own respective company at that time which so happened to be at the same office building.
Yap had this great idea about having some futuristic racing game with a fancy cool game play twist to it. I thought it was rather cool, but we decided to not commit to anything yet until we actually can prove the idea would work. So I went back and hacked up a prototype within a week.
Knowing very well that since we wanted to make it commercial, I had to pick the right engine to use. A racing game must always have good physics. Right? Who wouldn't want to see flipping crafts at high velocity? So I set on looking at which physics engine would be best for a case of good physics stability and usable with no license issue for commercial use. After some research, I had two choice that seemed good to me. ODE and Bullet. This is because both of them are open source (Which means I can look at the source code to know what's going on behind the scene) and they have been widely used. However, I had bad experience with ODE's constraint stability the last time I tried to use it. So I decided to give Bullet a try. Then when it came to rendering, I keenly decided to use Ogre3D for a few reasons. Firstly because I'm familiar with it, secondly because it has great community, and thirdly it has potential to render AAA graphics. That is how we ended up with a working prototype that proved to us we've got an engine that can do what our game needed.
So we have a prototype that showed us we've got the tech there (kinda). However, what's great about a racing game if it's got no great visuals? So Yap started modeling our first damn cool looking hovercraft. Mind you we were doing these on our free time after work. :) When he showed me his semi finished work, I was like, "That's it! We can do this!".
Eventually, we decided if we really want the game to happen, we need to work on it full time. This was a damn hard decision. For one, we were pretty comfortable in our own job. Secondly, we were holding quite some responsibility on our job scope. And thirdly, doing it full time means no salary, less spending and we have to survive on to our meager savings. In the end, we decided "a Man got to do what a Man's got to do". So we hand in our resignation letter and started working on our game full time.
Now what happens next was really a great experience. Truth be told, It's not for the faint of heart. But that's another tale to tell later.
LIQUID ROCK GAMES RULES! :)
Hmm.. what should I talk about? Ah, I'll start with how Liquid Rock happened. :) In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.. oh wait, no that's too far back. Lets fast forward some what. Back like a year ago, both Yap and I met up for lunch. We were working in our own respective company at that time which so happened to be at the same office building.
Yap had this great idea about having some futuristic racing game with a fancy cool game play twist to it. I thought it was rather cool, but we decided to not commit to anything yet until we actually can prove the idea would work. So I went back and hacked up a prototype within a week.
Knowing very well that since we wanted to make it commercial, I had to pick the right engine to use. A racing game must always have good physics. Right? Who wouldn't want to see flipping crafts at high velocity? So I set on looking at which physics engine would be best for a case of good physics stability and usable with no license issue for commercial use. After some research, I had two choice that seemed good to me. ODE and Bullet. This is because both of them are open source (Which means I can look at the source code to know what's going on behind the scene) and they have been widely used. However, I had bad experience with ODE's constraint stability the last time I tried to use it. So I decided to give Bullet a try. Then when it came to rendering, I keenly decided to use Ogre3D for a few reasons. Firstly because I'm familiar with it, secondly because it has great community, and thirdly it has potential to render AAA graphics. That is how we ended up with a working prototype that proved to us we've got an engine that can do what our game needed.
So we have a prototype that showed us we've got the tech there (kinda). However, what's great about a racing game if it's got no great visuals? So Yap started modeling our first damn cool looking hovercraft. Mind you we were doing these on our free time after work. :) When he showed me his semi finished work, I was like, "That's it! We can do this!".
Eventually, we decided if we really want the game to happen, we need to work on it full time. This was a damn hard decision. For one, we were pretty comfortable in our own job. Secondly, we were holding quite some responsibility on our job scope. And thirdly, doing it full time means no salary, less spending and we have to survive on to our meager savings. In the end, we decided "a Man got to do what a Man's got to do". So we hand in our resignation letter and started working on our game full time.
Now what happens next was really a great experience. Truth be told, It's not for the faint of heart. But that's another tale to tell later.
LIQUID ROCK GAMES RULES! :)
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