Anyway, I’m Trent Polack. I’ve been making games since I first started learning C++ when I was 14. That was about 17 years ago, so it’s been a while. I’ve written/coauthored various programming and graphics programming books over the years. And I’ve worked at companies like Stardock (Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod, Galactic Civilizations 2, The Political Machine 2008), LightBox Interactive (Starhawk), Team Chaos (all sorts of mobile projects), Art+Craft Entertainment (Crowfall), and now I’m working at an education/tech startup called planet3 and we’re working on something that I think is going to be really, really special. planet3 was started by the former president of National Geographics for, like, ages, and was co-founded by a bunch of other incredibly smart people and is a company filled to the brim with talent and intelligence and we’re working on something I really, truly believe in. Basically, we’re saving the world.

Joy Machine’s first game (Sacrilege), on the other hand, is about basically destroying the world. So, I really cover the gamut of world possibilities here. And since Joy Machine is, basically, just me, that’s really all the projects I can handle at once

Current Projects

I believe in a very open development process — I’d write more blog posts if it wasn’t for the pesky limitations of time.

My first game, Sacrilege, is about revisiting the god game genre that I feel has been largely abandoned in recent years — something that is an absolute crime. Basically, I want to take an idea that that was really well-executed in Guild Wars and give each player (god) a limited array of god powers and see how well-constructed that “deck” of god powers can be in an action/RTS/simulation.

I’ve spent equal time professionally as a programmer and designer, so I lean very heavily towards a System Designer philosophy. I believe well-designed and well-developed systems can interact naturally in a game to produce incredibly powerful and interesting results. So, as much as I want this to be an action/RTS for end-users it is, to me, more of a simulation of all of these crazy different systems that all interact with each other in very fundamental and dynamic ways. What’s the fun of lighting stuff on fire if that fire doesn’t spread? And what’s the fun of having a wildfire if you can’t extinguish it with water? And what’s the fun of water if you can’t freeze it and everything in it? Those are some primitive examples, but they’re the kind of interactions that’s a core concept to the entire game.

Originally, I wanted to have the entire world destructible so I’ve been using Voxelfarm as I’ve been developing the game but, for the time being, I’m relying on Unreal Engine 4’s static landscapes as I just can’t bank on the visual fidelity, performance, and reliability of Voxelfarm quite yet, but I have a great relationship with the Voxelfarm team and if it gets ready in time, I absolutely plan on revisiting the fully destructible world. And, even if I can’t do that in time for release, I definitely want to explore post-release modes that rely on that kind of dynamic environment.

Building the Landscapes

Oh, man, the landscape development process has been a long and complicated road. I don’t have tremendous traditional art skills, so I had no interest in developing a landscape in-engine and painting in all this foliage and detail work, so I knew I had to rely on procedurally-texturing and detailing out a landscape. I basically started around here: