| Morgan McGuire is a game consultant and researcher. He can be reached at morgan@graphics3d.com. |
Games
I've worked on several professional, indie, and hobby game titles for the PC platform since 1994. These range from classic Windows 3.1 shareware and through current-day DirectX and OpenGL titles. I have also been fortunate to track development efforts at other companies through many friends in the industry.Looking back at the older games, the surprise is not just how far the PC has come but how similar the fundamental aspects of game development remain. We still divide development effort across installers, configuration screens, in-house tools, and the "fancy" graphics of the day. We still seek ways to extend game time and optimize game play. And we still seek the twist on classic gaming themes that will capture players' imaginations.
Below is a journal-style list of commercial projects (both released and unreleased) that I worked on; you may also be interested in articles on game development or games research.
Iron Lore
Titan Quest is a AAA action role-playing game to be published by THQ in 2006. The game is set in the mythical worlds of ancient Greece and Egypt from new developer Iron Lore Entertainment. Iron Lore was co-founded by Age of Empires co-creator Brian Sullivan.Titan Quest
Win32. To be released 2006.
[Movie]
The Titans, gods before the gods, have escaped from their eternal prison to wreak havoc on the world. In this titanic struggle between old and new gods it is the heroes of humankind who will ultimately determine the fate of all existence. The player quests throughout the ancient world in a race to uncover the secrets needed to once again imprison these ancient gods. Journeying to fabled locations such as the Parthenon, the maze at Knossos, the Great Pyramids, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the player will have to overcome terrifying monsters and mythical beasts.
A flexible class system allows almost limitless ways for the player to develop their character. Skills can be customized in many ways, and never become obsolete.
ROBLOX
Indie developer ROBLOX created an on-line building toy similar to Legos. I worked on graphics and level design. The betas went live in 2005, and production continues towards the official release in 2006.ROBLOX
Win32 web game prototype 2005
Blue Axion
I co-founded indie developer Blue Axion in 2000. We created one tech demo and one playable prototype game. I led development and managed a team of two programmers, two artists, a game designer, and a script writer. The company lost funding and ended in 2002.Gods and Warriors
Unreleased Win32/Linux prototype 2002
Early tech-demo shots:
Gods and Warriors is a real-time strategy game where each player controls a single unit, blending Age of Empires with Battlefield 1942. (The blending is not just in gameplay; you can see the Age of Empires artwork used in this in-house prototype!)
In the multi-player only prototype, up to 32 players on two teams each assume one of five classes (Builder, Infantry, Pike, Archer, Priest). The builder can construct walls, buildings, sentry towers, and other structures. The three military units have different strengths for range vs. melee and defense. The priest both functions as a support unit and allows the entire team to move up the technology tree. Horse, chariot, and elephant mounts allow any unit to become a cavalry unit and cross the map quickly.
Freedom Hunter
Unreleased Win32 tech demo 2001
Freedom Hunter is a real-time 3D Anime quest game. The game design uses innovative user input and rendering techniques.
Uses a unique glyph-drawing system for control. Pushing the mouse button brings up a circular menu around the selected target. Dragging towards a menu option selects a circular sub-menu of actions. The relative locations of actions are consistent throughout the game, so the player quickly learns to draw various "L"-shapes called glyphs on screen to perform actions like attacking, communicating, and using special items. When the player draws a glyph quickly, the menu is supressed, so the play experience is unhampered by visual UI elements. The overall feel is similar to using a manual gearshift on a car or casting magical spells through gestures.
Morgan Systems: 90's Shareware for Win 3.1
Morgan Systems was the shareware company I ran while at MIT in the era when Windows 3.1 was on everyone's desktop and most games were still written for DOS. Our primary distribution medium was AOL, where as one of the only quality shareware providers our titles received about one million downloads total. I wrote code and drew most of the artwork; other college friends did some additional 3D modelling, playtesting, and contributed music.Shareware provides two great experiences. The first is close interaction with customers. The second is taking a product from idea through shipping in only a few months. The process experience I gained at scoping a software product, making it reliable on a wide range of end-user machines, creating installers and documentation, and marketing the software has proved applicable throughout my career.
Lithium
Unreleased Win16 game 1999
Space Blast
Unreleased Win16 prototype 1998
Moru's 3D Internet Chess
Unreleased Win16 game 2000
Multi-player chess with special controls
Radon
Win16 game 1998
Tetris-style game
Pac-Rat
Win16 game (1998)
Pac-Man style game. The title screen was my first experiment with real-time 3D under Windows.
Zero
Unreleased Win16 3D Virtual Environment (1996)
A Wolfenstein-like ray caster for real-time 3D environments on 16-bit Windows. To obtain high performance under the GDI it exclusively uses variations on the 2D BITBLT routine to create the appearance of 3D scenes. Unlike Wolfenstein, it supports multiple elevations and arbitrarily-angled walls.
Ricochet
Win16 game 1995
A Breakout-style game with 100 levels, a tilting paddle for extra control, and 3D rendered backgrounds. Power-ups and features include extra balls frozen in ice blocks, extra lives, speed accelerators, indestructible blocks, blocks that slowly crack, and layouts that encourage trick and banked shots.
Xenon
Win16 game 1995
My brother Max and I wrote this Scorched Earth-style game during a one-week winter break. The game includes multiple AI levels, support for up to five players, a map editor, destroyable environments, 12 levels, and the ability to tunnel under the terrain. We custom coded the UI to emulate the then-new Win95 look even on older Win 3.1 machines.
Hobby Projects
Space Blast
Unreleased DOS prototype 1990
Mouse-controlled platformer.
Tools
Win32 GDI 3D library and tools used at Morgan Systems, 1998
The Laser3D IDE is a full editing environment for coding interactive 3D scenes in a Scheme-like language. The editor supports modern code-browsing tools and was licensed commercially. Laser3D used a GDI-based 3D rendering library called "G7" (this predates Win32 OpenGL!). G7 was the 7th Windows rendering library I worked on; it is the predecessor to the modern "G3D" library, although the last lines of shared code have long since been rewritten.