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...