Regular, Every Day TOAST, Or, Alternatively, Simply, TOAST.
It's really quite ridiculous, but that's a pretty good description of what we do anyway, so it fits.
redTOAST was started in 2001 or so as a collaborative project between 2 of us, who realized that we were no longer missing any critical knowledge to make a game. Now of course we knew very little, but we decided to just do it. And we did it. We made a game. It was even fun. It was a StarControl style game (that is, top down space-physics ship combat). The code was disgusting. The interface frightening. BUT. It. Worked.
If nothing else, TOAST has been a vehicle of learning. We called the first project Star Control: Negative. It made us better programmers.
We followed up with Negative Two, dropping the StarControl homage. Negative Two taught us exactly what happens to every single other project. We called it second-system-syndrome, but we like alliteration, so you'll have to forgive us. It the simple fact that, after having learned so much from Negative, we designed a much more complicated system for Two, and it imploded under its own impossibility. So we learned a lot there too.
I was in graduate school about this time, and my partner in crime ended up working elsewhere, out of range of easy collaboration. We buried Negative Two, consecrated the ground and let it fade into memory. Having learned a bit more about software architecture in graduate school, I decided to apply the combination of personal experience and lecture, and started a new project. I called this project Twilight in the City of Kaiur, a Real-time strategy/economics game set in a... well, the setting isn't important.
I obsessed over this project to an absurd degree. It was in my thoughts all the time. I bought a laptop so I could work everywhere. Step by step, line by line, I built this crazy system over the course of a year. It worked. The software did not implode under its own weight; well, not for a while at least. Knowledge only goes so far without experience. Working with this software, with the new methods learned (I found out 6 months later they're called Design Patterns), was an absolute dream. Stuff just worked. Well, the network never really did. And the game design was so miserable, it's really quite entertaining (in retrospect).
Twilight had to end though, it got too big a game and did become unmanagable. I spent the next year splitting twilight's codebase into a set of libraries, refining and improving as I went.
This was a mistake.
Now, I learned a lot and had some lovely code, but it was MIND NUMBING. I stopped because I was losing interest. It had to be a game. If there wasn't a goal product, there was no point. Therefore, to such ends a new project was started.
Two new friends joined in for this one. We called it the one-week project. We took the fun parts of the Negative (one) game, and rebuilt it for multiplayer, with the new libraries and code to back it. The 3 of us cranked for a week, and 2 weeks later we played a multiplayer session with 8 people at my birthday LAN. No, it wasn't perfect, but it was a only bloody week. The game was called Negative again, but rather than being '3', we called it 'ether', both as a pun on 'e' (2.718), and as a reference to some physics adjustments we introduced. The ships sort of surfed in space, rather than using free-space physics.
But apparently we're not good at working on group projects together. The e-team didn't reconvene to continue Negative Ether in any meaningful way.
I think around this point I began to write my thesis and get busier in graduate school. It follows, then, that I started work on Twilight 2. Did I repeat second-system-syndrome? Certainly. But I was at least aware of it this time. I focused on certain elements that I wanted to have experience with. I wrote a scripting engine from scratch. I did more focus on generic actions, states, user interface. The game was substantially more data driven, and it worked, even if it wasn't elegant. The economics aspect of the game worked, but it was only about one third the game content. So, naturally, the project had to die. It was too big, but more importantly...
I began working for Bunkspeed. Now, I love being the type of person who programs all day at work, then goes home, and continues as if nothing changed. For awhile, though, this wasn't achievable. This was my first actual job, since graduate school and related activities don't count. I mean, I spent all of graduate school on the previous paragraphs, so you know how serious I was about my 'formal' education. My actual education was quite successful, thanks to the free time afforded by being in graduate school. Something seems weird there. Must be me.
Where was I? OR right. Twilight 2 was too complicated in conjunction with work. So I reluctantly buried it too. It felt like my game programming history was a sequence of graveyards, but each grave had yielded a flowerbed of knowledge, so I never considered it time wasted.
6 months or so later I decided I wanted to do an 'easy' project. I must've gotten over my fetish for complexity. I began touting principles like KISS, YAGNI, bla bla. I also got tired of fighting multiplayer networking. So! A simple project. This project would be YAN: Yet Another Negative. "Negative Again". Built for simplicity. Graphically? Everything was particles, no shaders, no complex features. Just lots and lots of particles. Data complexity? No states or complicated data; just property bags of ship, weapon, projectile parameters.
It was simple and fun. I still play it at work. I still tweak the numbers in the files, even though I haven't recompiled in years. I stopped active work on it 2 years ago. It's the closest thing I have to complete, and it isn't.
So in short: made some games, played one.
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