Weddings and Indie Games Beyond GarageGame's Shores

First of all, I'd like to let the community know that I just got married on the 13th of June (that's right, Friday the 13th!). Below is a picture of my beautiful wife Marni and my ugly mug! I look like I've got a secret! Some probably noticed (and more probably didn't) that I'm changing my name. We're both hyphenating our names so that we can win the most pretentious name award! Now we just need to go places where they announce us.

Quote:

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"The Montgomery-Blakes have arrived..."

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I have decided to do something somewhat different and most likely unexpected with this blog. Rather than writing about positive and cool things that are happening in the Torque community (read the forums and other blogs and news segments for such coolness!), I thought I would expand the bases to show some of the things that I think are cool in *other* indie engine communities.

I've been approached by several people on different forums because I'm the "community manager" (AKA "Guy Who Posts a Lot") here at GG, and am not shy of putting it in my profiles abroad. And doing so has allowed me to meet people who are working on some great indie projects! It has also allowed me to get a grip on how others feel about Torque and GarageGames as well as their chosen communities as their pockets of GameDev utopia. Some are advocates, some are fanboiz, some haters; all pretty cool people. In all, just like most communities where people set up shop!

I'm passionate about indie game development and love that indie game developers can get their games done regardless of the technology that they are using to do it. Being a Torque advocate, I would love to see all of these project in Torque, but I also understand that different engines are more applicable to different devstyles. I think this is also heartfelt on the part of the InstantAction team since their web API is tech-neutral, allowing developers using most of the engines out in the wild (and behind closed doors) with their tech.

UNITY 3D
Unity is a great Mac-based engine with a friendly artflow and environment oriented towards rapid development. It has a strong and supportive community and pretty much rocks around the clock! They've got some extremely talented people working on some excellent games as well (don't most of these great communities?)!

Infinite Onslaught
topic on Unity's Forums
Play with Unity Web Player

3rd Person Shooter
Topic on Unity Forums
Play with Unity Web Player

Acceleration Belt
Unity Topic
Site
Play with Unity Web Player

TraceOn
Forum topic
dev Blog
WebPlayer

Perth Racer
Unity Forum
web site / WebPlayer

AI Apocalypse
forum topic
website

Ridley from Metroid
Forum topic
web player

CONITEC 3D GAME STUDIO
If you've been around indie and hobbyist game development for a while, you've most likely heard of Conitec's 3D GameStudio A-series engines (A4/5/6/7/etc). The Lite-C language has improved the accessibility of the engine, as have the updated Lite-C tutorials. The WED tutorials that ship with A7 are still based on A5 and A6, but can be followed without difficulty. The user community is excellent and there is an extremely dedicated individual which produces some amazing tutorials and user magazines for the community. Mike Duggan, who wrote the Torque for Teens book also wrote the excellent Official Guide to 3D GameStudio

A7titude - an experimental game with style
Forum topic

The Disenfranchized
Forum topic

MechBuilder
Forum topic


NEO AXIS
NeoAxis is a C# engine that utilizes OGRE as its renderer and has a distinctive entity-based structure. It has some great and intuitive editor features. The licensing scheme is per-title and requires splash screens on all but the commercial and source versions of the license.

Transportando o Brasil (originally in B3D and now being ported to NA)
forum topic
web site

ALICE Chatterbot
(ALICE reference for context)
forum topic
YouTube Video
Company Blog about it

C64 Emulator
forum topic
YouTube Video

There are a ton more, but my blogging fingers are tired. There are some absolutely awesome games being developed in the Blitz, DarkBasic, GameCore (previously BeyondVirtual), and C4 communities as well. I'll just have to cover them sometime in the indeterminant future.