The release version of Garage Games' Torque Game Builder has been, well... released! Up 'til now, it's been in an "early adopter" state, but now you can be a full-fledged adopter if you get your butt over there and buy this bad-boy up!

If you're not clear on what TGB is, I'll give a quick overview here, but you really just need to go read through the feature list and then snag the 30-day demo to see what's up for yourself. TGB is a full 2D (and pseudo-3D, I suppose) game development engine, complete with great tutorials and even tools for creating deliverables at the end. Embedded tools include an interface editor, content/art manager, level editor, tile editor, particle editor, editing editor... editors everywhere. Bah... just go read the list!

It really is very impressive from what I've seen up until now. I just downloaded the final release so I'm not sure what's new for me, but I've read about quite a lot of changes and additions... all getting rave reviews. Of course, most of the reviews are from die-hard GG followers and admitted Torque freaks, but that's fine. Leave it to rabid followers to tear apart a new product and uncover the good/bad within days... they already did that before and GG took the feedback and rolled a bunch of fixes/changes into TGB just in the last few weeks! Nice work, Garage Games.

I'll leave you with this... Garage Games freakin' rocks. I know I'm supposed to try being unbiased, but those people are from the Damn Fine Folks clan. Those guys have worked tirelessly for many years with the sole purpose of building up independent games and the Indie community. Their support for all things Indie has been inspirational, at the least. I'll pimp their goods any day.

Rock on, GG!! :)

This white paper, What About Flash? Can We Really Make Games With It? is a great read if you're in the business of developing "casual games" or online games and you've pondered the value of Flash in your life. I've been really strongly researching alternatives to using Flash and Director/Shockwave for online games, but this is a good article showing many details about what Flash offers and where it fails.

I've been working with Flash for a long time now, but only within the last couple years have I really dug into it to see some of the power behind it. I worked with Macromedia Director (yeah, I know it's Adobe now) for a long time and moved to Flash because of clients. I like them both for different things, and I despise each of them for some stuff. This article at least analyzes the product from a non-marketing angle. It's a presentation the author gave at a Game Developers Conference one year and I think it's still pretty complete.

For bigger projects and shareware projects, I'm still considering other tools... but I'll discuss that later. :)