3D Game Programming All in One (Course Technology PTR Game Development Series)

Well things got a little more hectic in the chapter. As you saw, designing a game is about answering questions. Often, the answers are the easy part—coming up with the questions can be tougher at times. Creating a requirements specification for your game is not only useful, it's almost a mandatory activity.

There are things that constrain our design, and we need to keep those constraints in mind. Every project will have different limits. One example you saw was that you probably shouldn't consider using Torque to make a massively multiplayer game.

We then looked at the Mission Editor in detail. You can use it to place and align all of the objects that will inhabit your game world. We used it to place some particle effects, in the form of a camp fire and a waterfall, as well as some structures that will be useful for gameplay.

Let's examine our requirements again. We checked off item 1 right from the get-go. Now we can check off a bunch of other items: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 22, 27, and 28. We've also done parts of 9, 23, 24, and 25—but they need some programming as well to make them reality.

In the next chapter, we delve into more server-side gameplay issues, like spawning the player into random locations, getting a vehicle into the world, and triggering events.