Determinance screenshot

Debugging in slightly greater atmosphere

It’s 9.30pm and I’m trying to find a DT crash bug. Not so unusual you might think, but I’m not in my study in my village in England. I’m in the GarageGames offices at night, with only three guys left plus the cleaners, running DT on as many different computers as I can find while Ben Garney gives me Torque debugging help on my laptop. The lights are off and while waiting for stuff to crash I go and play on the Orbz arcade machine in their massive basement out back.

Being at the actual GG offices during a (basically) normal week makes it all seem very much more real. As part of the community GG can often feel a distant entity. But being here, surrounded by the people who make the engine (and everything else) what it is, while preparing a game which takes Torque in quite a few new and exciting directions, is a very different matter.

And the Orbz Arcade Machine may be the most inspiring object I’ve ever seen. An arcade machine is a big, expensive piece of equipment dedicated to playing one game. Every other system has many uses, and one game only makes up a tiny percentage of what that system does. There is no greater respect that you can give to a game than to take a cubic-metre chunk of space and make it that game’s house; it’s land. Only in an arcade machine does a game have a physical existance.

And that’s a big deal.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 5:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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