Torque News
There are a few interesting things happening of late on the GarageGames front that may be of interest to indie developers - even those who don't have anything to do with their engine or tools.

For those who use the Torque Game Builder (my quick take from a few months ago can be found here), it's now up to version 1.1.1. I've played with the new version a little bit since it's release several days ago. The first thing I encountered was that the animations of my 3D shapes no longer seemed to work. I don't know if that was an artifact of the code merging I did, or if it's a new bug.

I'm really pretty frustrated about the problems with the t2dShape3D class - the biggest being it doesn't work under DirectX. That was the key ingredient of the "special sauce" that made TGB interesting to me, and it's still not quite working as advertised.

In spite of my pet peeve, I do have to admit the engine is really looking quite sharp. There are two key changes (to me) with the new rev that really make it exciting. First of all, they've added a new sorting system for objects so that they can be sorted by Y values. Looking through the code, it looks like they've got similar sorting for X values, too, but it's not been documented and I've not tried it out. So I can't say if it works or not. But it would certainly make something like this far easier to do:



The other key feature is that tile maps are now integrated with the level editor. I have had a chance to play with this feature a little bit, and it really makes a huge difference, particularly in the early prototyping stages.

Hot on the heels of this release (enabled, one might say, by this release), is the new "Torque Game Builder Adventure Kit". I haven't looked at this one yet, but it looks very intriguing, as you can tell by the screenshot on the right. The new release of TGB + the Adventure Kit really seems to target the isometric RPG development community.

It's up against some heavy competition, so I'm not sure how well it will do. TGB plus the adventure kit is $140 - $240, which gives you a skeleton to create a pretty decent 2D RPG. However, there are far more complete tools already out there, such as RPG Maker, which also have a lower price point. The biggest difference is undoubtably in flexibility, but at a cost of more "do-it-yourself" work. It'll be fascinating to see what emerges.

Torque-X is probably GarageGames' biggest coup to date. An engine that lets you program games for the XBox 360? I can't think of a bigger PR move or a better way to make Torque the "engine of choice" for legions of wannabe game developers. Hordes of XBox 360 fans with visions of making their own "Halo 2, only better?" Yeah. Score for GarageGames. Not that I want to disparage said dreamers who will be signing up for Microsoft's "Creator's Club" developer program. I'm sure there are going to be some excellent games appearing in their network as part of this program (not "Halo 2 only better," but quality games nonetheless), and it will undoubtably be a key part of the genesis of many future professional game developers. And indies! And I will conceed that the Torque Game Builder tools for Torque-X will likely vastly improve the chances of these guys losing their "wannabe" status and actually creating and completing game for the console.

And finally, the big news last night was that the Indie Games Con for this year was cancelled. This sucks, as I was finally going this year (with my boss at Wahoo Studios). We had tickets and everything. I can imagine the reasoning behind this move. Torque-X is GarageGames' ticket to hit some excellent traction in the game development world (not just indie, but game development in general), and so I can understand how they'd want to focus their resources into that rather than into the conference. In addition, indie and "casual" game development conferences have been appearing all over the place of late, with the explosive growth in the casual games market - with apparently more financial backing. I can see why GarageGames might have trouble making the IGC stand out without just becoming an out-of-town "Torque User's Group" meeting.

That doesn't change me being annoyed. Oh, well. Those are extra days on my schedule that I can now devote to game development, I hope.

Labels: Torque

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:57 AM (Permalink)