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!! :)

Well, they spammed me (not really, it was a newsletter I'm 'scribed to,) and I couldn't resist any longer... the Torque Game Builder (aka: "Torque 2D") is nearing its end of "early adopter" phase, so the price is still $100. After June 7, '06 the price goes up to permanent levels a bit higher than that. This isn't really an advert for them as much as a notice to others who might have been teetering on the edge of this purchase, like me. I pondered the buy for a long while, lacking a project to use with it. However, the price just seems like too good a deal not to give it a whirl. We'll see how it goes, but maybe I'll be making some 2D TGB powered games here soon!

If you're working with TGB, let us know how you like it! Just sign up for a free account and post a comment here for now. I might work out something more formal later for the discussion of various game engine development, but this will do for now... especially considering the very low traffic I have ATM. Wheee!

Okay, my brain is swimming in too much information right now... I wanted to post something about this bit of research, but I've still got a lot of reading to do before a solid, discussable perspective coagulates. For now, you might just want to start some research alongside mine and see where it takes you. I'll talk more about what I'm seeing later. Here's the deal real quick:

Garage Games has announced that their Constructor project has hit the beta phase. Torque Constructor is a ".map (as in the .map file format) editing and .dif (the Torque interior file format) producing program" for creating 3D content for the Torque 3D engine. It might also work for creating content for anything that uses .map, but I'm not sure yet -- like I said, I'm still underway on this voyage. If you've been using Valve's Hammer, GtkRadiant or maybe QuArK to do some level editing, you might be right on board, too... if you don't know what any of those are, you have more research to do! :P

If that's enough to pique your interest, you really ought to shoot over and start reading. Great stuff! There's a great batch of links on that post that will get you well on the way to understanding more about Constructor.

Also, that blog post serves as a fantastic introduction to concave vs. convex models, specifically how they are treated in Torque, but it's a great read for any 3D game artist, I think.

The Game Dev Sourcebook is set to be a community-driven resource for video game design and development. Covering as many topics as the community thinks is relevant, the Sourcebook can be appended and edited by the community itself... editors will be carefully chosen, but any registered site user can add comments to contribute to the topics at hand. The pages will be carefully moderated to keep things on-topic and reasonable, but for the most part, I hope the contributors will take the work seriously and write thoughtful, eloquent posts.

At the beginning of this project, the edges may be a little rough. Categories will be the most challenging for me at the start -- they always are. I have trouble being thorough enough without going overboard. Again, please feel free to post your comments about the book and help me make it better. After all, it's our resource!

[I'll edit this intro page later after I see how this thing is shaping up... I told you it's a new feature for me, so please bear with me! :]

The quest for a new (for me) game development platform continues for me. I've been using Macromedia Flash (someday, I'll just give in and call it Adobe Flash or whatever... not today) and some Director/Shockwave to make games for the past 1.5 years. The main two projects during that time involved the need to deliver on PC, Mac and online... hard to ignore the validity of Flash as the tool of choice here, eh?

The thing is... I want to do something bigger in the future and I'm not sure Flash cuts it. Director is certainly better for bigger projects, for the most part... better performance, arguably better support for large data handling, cheaper multiplayer support (for now), etc. Flash is catching up in a lot of ways and Director is falling behind in other ways... I'm just getting antsy to try something else. There are many options, but here's one I'm targeting for further review:

I've put a lot of effort into learning about Garage Games' Torque Game Engine in the past. I've had a license for TGE since around 2003 and it's very sweet. The thing is, it's recently gotten immensely sweeter due to recent movement by GG toward making the XBox 360 another platform you can potentially deliver content on!(!!!) Yeah, that's right, it's possible to make a game in TGE (more acurately, Torque Shader Engine, I think, TSE,) and a path exists to create the game for delivery on Xbox Live Arcade! Suhweeet.

Now, it's not free since there are special licensing fees involved, but it's still not very expensive considering what it's typically cost to make a game for a console. The biggest excitement for me is that I can play around with TGE for my $100, move into TSE if I decide to continue development and only when I think I have a solid game for the 360, begin the push in that direction using the same core game code!

Seriously, it's got me frickin' stoked! It's not easy, but the potential set in front of me (and us) is astounding to me. I hadn't put much thought into developing on a console for many years, considering I didn't command a few million bucks minimum. Now, I'm starting to consider it something plausible to target.

I'll point out the technology a little more later, but for now, the above links can get you started on the path to learning more about Torque and what Garage Games is doing to support Indie development. Yay.

One last point about GG's products: their 2D game kit implementations of the TGE tech are really sweet. I'm looking very seriously at the Torque Game Builder also, which is the product formerly called "Torque 2D" I think. It's looking more and more viable as a 2D game dev platform, especially given their new level/map editors they introduced at GDC. This might just be a platform I start developing some 2D games on instead of just Flash all the time.

We'll see...