Where's the beef

Submit your own resources!

Matthew Langley   (Jul 01, 2005 at 20:22 GMT)

yes :) (btw nice plan)

Canon   (Jul 01, 2005 at 20:29 GMT)

you can add "MiniOne Racing" to your list.
Do you know Fast Lane Carnage? it's a game made with the TGE, and it will be released soon.

Christophe

Jason Swearingen   (Jul 01, 2005 at 20:47 GMT)

yes from me too :)

Justin DuJardin   (Jul 01, 2005 at 20:51 GMT)

I've got nothing :(

...and LT sucks.

Best Regards,
-justin` (rocks pat)

Chris Labombard   (Jul 01, 2005 at 20:54 GMT)

"What exactly do we need to do to get more indy games out there?"

I'm getting killed out here. I'm a one man team. I have almost everything I need, but I can't for the life of me seem to get an artist to clean up... I've went through 3 of them already. I'm almost at the point (gimme a day or so) where I wont be able to finish up this code because I don't have the art to do it... There is only so much you can do with placeholders.

I know why artist don't stay... I move at a very very fast pace, but I cant help that.

I should have a demo by the end of the weekend. I'll show it to you. If you could hook me up with an artist who will follow through, then I'm all set. It's not like I want it for free. I have some cash for them.

Please don't put us on the backburner.

Joshua Dallman   (Jul 01, 2005 at 20:56 GMT)

Pat -- I couldn't agree more on all counts. Jeff T's address at IGC last year basically said this same thing -- where's the games, people? At IGC, I was myself disappointed at the number and quality of games on display. And from this poll on the GG associate forum there's a majority that agrees:

###

How satisfied are you with the quantity and quality of indie games being made and put out there?

0% Very satisfied
12% Satisfied
18% Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
37% Dissatisfied
31% Very Dissatisfied

###

In my RTG one year plan, I listed the top five qualities that I've leaned on the most in the past year. I didn't list them in order of importance, but I can conclusively say that the top trait needed is persistence.

I thought Shelled would take 2-3 months when I started. Six months have come and gone. I've got a hell of a nice game, but even from here it needs another 3 months to be "done" and another 3 months after that to be "really done." One year! And not just any year, but a year of daily work, weekly spending, and pushing like hell.

You wouldn't know it by reading my Shelled plans, but I've been discouraged dozens of times, wondering if it's all for naught, if it'll ever pan out, if I should just quit and try something else, something I don't have to force so hard, if my paychecks would be better spent elsewhere. But I'm persistent... patient and persistent. That's the only thing I can guess why so many projects start, but so few ever release.

I went through the dev snapshots of the day when I first joined the community and started with the very first one, then clicked on whatever link was provided, and all of them were dead links or pages that haven't been updated in years, with a few of them bothering to note that the project was on hold or was stopped. The GG dev snapshot archive is a graveyard of dead projects, and may they not rest in peace. It's exciting to launch a new project, to announce a new big idea, to start something new. But once that buzz wears off, you've got a heck of a lot of lackluster unexciting work ahead of you, and few have the reserve to see it through. Cliche but true, "you can lead a horse to water..."

Personally I think GG is quite simply ahead of its time. As video games enter mainstream culture more and more we'll see more people play, then want to mod, then want to make. Within the last maybe 5 years or so, creating music via programs like FruityLoops and GarageBand has just entered the mainstream, and that's just MUSIC... not fully rendered dolby 5.1 three dee interactive dynamic entertainment, an order of difficulty higher (to be sure) than messing with bass lines and midi files.

I'd love to see more indie games released, more active, serious, high quality indie developers, more risks and their delicious rewards... but in the meantime I'm content to relegate myself to somewhat of a pioneer, if not part of the first wave of indie developers than no doubt part of the second, helping to bridge and encourage the third. The best way to do that, I feel, is for me to make games and show that you can do it and you can succeed.

Chris Labombard   (Jul 01, 2005 at 21:03 GMT)

Joshua - I may not have been in the water as long as you, but I feel like we're paddeling the same kind of boat.

Keep your eyes above the waterline.

Joshua Dallman   (Jul 01, 2005 at 21:07 GMT)

@Chris: I think the name "BrokeAss Games" sums it up nicely, and without even the need for a byline :)

Melv May   (Jul 01, 2005 at 21:37 GMT)

Quite a while ago when I was fairly young, I thought it was a good idea to write a sci-fi story. My nieve mind told me that all I needed to do was get an idea (which I could contain in my mind in one go) and put that to paper. I went out and purchased a wad of ruled-paper and plenty of decent pens. Armed with what I thought would be all I needed to get my ideas into print, I began.

I was suprised to find a number of unexpected hurdles in my way. The first being that I hadn't actually thought out my story very well before committing to writing but what the hell, writing was *fun*. I was constantly revising passages and characters and ended up just rewriting stuff all the time without getting anywhere but I was having *fun*. The next problem was that I realised that I didn't actually understand the subject-matter as well as I had convinced myself that I did but I didn't want to compromise because my story was going to be so kick ass (*ahem*). I then discovered that writing a book in solitude was rather dull so I asked a friend to help me with it and we restarted another story with great enthusiasm and we initially had *fun* doing so.

A little later, to my suprise, I discovered that collaborating wasn't always as fun as it seemed it would be on the first day when ideas were flowing. This was getting hard and dull. All I wanted was a kick-ass story but I didn't want all these problems to stand in my way, I just wanted results and I wanted them *NOW*! bwaaarr!!!

Many years on, I fully understand where I went wrong; I was trying to write a huge story with lots of complex characters, plots and scenarios without any prior experience. I was trying to build a rocket-ship when I could barely build a paper-airplane and I saw all the books out there that I wanted my story to be like. My friend was enthusiastic only because he'd not tried writing before. When the problems appeared, all enthusiasm disappeared. I should've done a handful of short stories first to get me started and get some wins under my belt. Finishing something is such a buzz!!

The analogy here is, of course, purchasing an engine so that you can have *fun* writing a game. It isn't *fun* writing a game!!!! It's bloody hard work first with fun-icing layered on top.

The lack of good quality games doesn't suprise me as much as the lack of smaller games that should be everywhere with all the cool technology GG brings to the table. Surely everyone doesn't make the mistake of attempting a Half-Life rip-off? It's hard to believe that so many people would set their goals so high so that they can't achieve stuff.

I'd love to have every developer post to a list with a single genre game they'd love to write. Would the majority be FPS, platformer, RTS, parlour, shootem'up etc?

It ain't the tech or the documentation, no way. The machine gun could simply be lack of experience, too lofty goals, too much tech as a distraction, too much hobby-programming (playing with the engine). I guess nobody said you had to make 'products' with the engine when you can have so much fun just playing. Who knows what the motivations are when you purchase TGE/TSE/T2D etc.

There are exceptions of course (as mentioned above) and some great games are being produced.

Okay, it's late so I'm going to stop rambling now...

- Melv.

Canon   (Jul 01, 2005 at 21:53 GMT)

@Josh
Fast Lane Carnage is made by a 7 persons team, and they all have a game development experience in previous jobs.

Brian Jones   (Jul 01, 2005 at 21:57 GMT)

I think Melv nailed it in the head. I've been sitting on my copy of the engine forever, and as I continued to think about all my *big ideas* over the years I realized that I had pie in the sky goals that realistically couldn't be achieved. Recently I bought 3d Game Programming All In One, which finally pulls together all the little dabbling I've done over the years. I've actually written a design document that satisfies my concept for a fun game, technically easy to produce given time, but... there's always a but...

It's hard to get started! I have a slew of reasons as to why, but I guess it boils down to being serious. I think that I'm finally getting it all straight in my head, and might actually buckle down here in the next couple weeks and get into the groove, but it's hard to do that first step. I guess I could equate it to writing a college level English paper. The first paragraph is freakin' hard to get started, but once you bust out that thesis and introduction the rest of the paper flows.

Brian Hunter   (Jul 01, 2005 at 21:58 GMT)

I will not comment on others as I am fresh into the development scene, on a professional level. On an amatuer level I know the biggest source of problems I encountered was the team we had put together to work did not do so because of a combination of distractions and a surprise to the team that development was, indeed, hard and often times not enjoyable work. Distractions were understandable on the amatuer level - new video games coming out all of the time, MMORPGs sucking up people upon demo, etc. The surprising point was the members of the team that stopped working and or quit due to the fact that what we were doing was not "fun".

I think part of the problem I see from a very new perspective is people think making games is indeed this enjoyable experience that is easy to do. I mean really, video games are their passion they will love it, right ? But a quick exposure to everything it takes and finding out there is no shortcuts to hard work and following through with your dreams shows people they got into something that reqiures dedication not found in other places. I dont blame them at all either. For what few rare voices you have telling people up front "Game development is a hard labor of love that a lot fail at for <these reasons>" you have a thousandfold voices screaming at the top of their lungs "WOULDNT IT BE AWESOME TO OWN YOUR OWN ENGINE AND MAKE YOUR OWN VIDEO GAME !? IF I HAD MY OWN ENGINE I WOULD MAKE A GAME THAT KNOCK THE SOCKS OF <insert whatever development company here>" drowning out the voices of reason and experience.

But in that same light, really difficult to convince people that game development IS HARD and often times NOT FUN without throwing them in the middle of a fully expectant project and letting them feel the waves hit them. People convince themselves that no matter what amount of warning they have from those who know better that those voices "just dont have the compassion for video games that *I* have" and away they go convincing themselves again. Coming from a household of programming I knew before getting into it all exactely how serious a commitment development was going to be ...

... my turn at rambling over. Im gonna go do laundry.

Edit: whoooops! should have read the thread, Melv said about the same thing more elogantly, mwuhahaha!!
Edited on Jul 01, 2005 22:01 GMT

Kirby Webber   (Jul 01, 2005 at 22:01 GMT)

Once you guys get that elusive "make-game" button working, you'll have Torque titles coming out your ears!

~Heh.

Sorry Pat, couldn't resist. =\

Christopher Dapo   (Jul 01, 2005 at 22:05 GMT)

Where's the beef?

In my BELLY!

Now give me a popsicle stick so I can regurgitate it out for ya!

(At least I didn't mention it coming out the other end, then my games would be...)

I've been 'withheld' from my workstation for about 3 months now, and unless something pushes this rotten, redneck community here to help me get it back, or I somehow come up with the $250 ransom on it, I think it's gone for good (if the bastard hasn't tossed it in the sound yet like he threatened).

Hmm... I could always ask if GG could send some lawers down here and sue the hell out of them for stolen software! They do have my copy of TGE after all.

I was just getting into TGE, too! :'(

If it wasn't for my lack of a system that could run TGE, I'd be working my ass off to make a game just like I was before it was stolen.

Oh well. I'm not giving up at least!

- Ronixus

Myk Sanders   (Jul 01, 2005 at 22:06 GMT)

If you want more indy games, having decent art tools works. Ive been a TGE owner for years, and am still waiting for some decent tools that an artist can use.

It might just be my personal ignorance, but I dont like fighting my engine to see results.
Edited on Jul 01, 2005 22:07 GMT

David Tiernan   (Jul 01, 2005 at 22:08 GMT)

I feel the starters are decent but lacking, even the FPS starter you need to modify to have multiple weapons and I don't know any FPS with one weapon.

I think it would be fun for the community if you held a contest and had people re-work the starters into more complete formats. This gives the community a buzz to play with, gives GG a more solid foundation with thier starters, and if documented correctly would definatly drop alot of the harsh learning curve of torque.

Prizes could be simple perhaps a commercial license of TGE or some of the content packs or something.

A game engine is only as powerfull as the community that supports it, and as such Torque is one of the most powerfull engines I have ever seen however there needs to be a way to help the initial learning curve.

Andrew Haydn Grant   (Jul 01, 2005 at 22:12 GMT)

3D is hard!
Amazing, really. Increase the number of dimensions by just 50%, and you might expect it to get 50% harder. But, Noooo....

Matthew Langley   (Jul 01, 2005 at 22:28 GMT)

Since these are comments on a plan that is being blunt, I'm going to be blunt to, sorry if I offend anyone *shrug

Quote:

---

but I dont like fighting my engine to see results.

---

Quote:

---

A game engine is only as powerfull as the community that supports it

---

excuses (though I like your attitude David, much better than Myk).

You can throw all the excuses out the door, the window, whichever is your preference ;) The power is not in the tools, its in the user. The tools are simply tools, they don't make a game, they don't create anything, they simply do what you tell them to do. If other have used the same tools to make a couple AAA titles as well as some games that have been ported to Xbox live arcade, I highly doubt its the tools that are at fault if you cannot.

the Starters are meant to be starters, not entire games. If they were entire games then everyone would have the same game just moded. Also the art tools are fine, sure they could use some work, are they getting some needed love? yes! Can you get art into TGE without nearly as much trouble as people bitch about, another yes! So those who use excuses can pull their heads out of their asses, get to coding, making art assets, exporting, or keep on complaining for all I care, just means my games won't have competition.

"Where's the beef?"

I will answer that question in 3 months at IGC... what about you (to those that make excuses)? will you still be making excuses?
</blunt mode>
Edited on Jul 01, 2005 22:29 GMT

David Tiernan   (Jul 01, 2005 at 22:47 GMT)

Not stating to make an entire game just expand the starter a little, like 2 guns which gives people the ability to see how to load up as many as they want. The door mod for animating a door, alot of 3d shooters are indoors and have doors I understand the speed that tribes 2 was played that doors would of been a hinderance.

There little additions that could polish it off a bit better, The community factor is there, the help from the programmers of the engine are there but alot of people start this with little or no mod knowlage. Heck I remember modding duke nukem 3d years ago and had fun with it.

Some people do get frustrated with the art pipeline however it has gotten alot better. Cartography Shop has done wonders over what we had with quark and Torque Constructor is on it's way as well. Blender is a good free solution and last I checked Dreamer was looking into making it "feel" like 3ds max. Alot of the people who use the torque engine like myself cannot afford $3500 for 3dsmax so it limits our tools. Milkshape is good but inability to do vertice selection and modification in the 3d viewport is a hinderance.

Gamespace I would buy but I didn't care for the interface just didn't feel good and I read too much in thier forums that the bones system can hose at anytime killing tons of work.

The google search engine has made searching the site incredibally fast which helps just think there needs to be a hair more polish. If you take a look at the racing.starter it has incorperated waypoints, and checkpoints which when I first played with torque weren't there. Thats the racing polish it's not a full game but you have a really sturdy foundation to start with.

No offense was taken btw just giving further depth on my view.

I feel with the onslaught of the new art tools, a game like illumina on the horizon to show off the FPS all over again, Lore out of the hanger, and a little polish and some up to date tutorials to get everyone up to speed then there is no limit. Also I feel after the first TSE game ever launches if marketed correctly will drive business like crazy due to it's AAA quality.

Andrew Nicholson   (Jul 01, 2005 at 23:53 GMT)

Well said @ King Tut

Rex   (Jul 02, 2005 at 00:38 GMT)

@David: Vertex Selection in Milkshape's Perspective Viewport can be achieved by holding Shift + alt and then box selection of the vertices with the mouse.

Why don't you see more stuf? It was answered a few times in the above posts, "it's hard".

It's hard when an artist goes asking for scripting/code help and they're told quite often, "you got the Source, do it yerself". When you ask WHY? something seems weird or doesn't do what you'd expect[like the spinning player, and when exactly does headSide play??], answers don't exist outside the SDK Private Forum. Perhaps more experiences from teams, demonstrating the process towards successful completion may help those flailing??? just some thoughts.

One of the best Threads I've seen in the few years of visitation was recently and by Stephen Z, I think. The thread entered into the conceptualization of the scripting process instead of the usual answer, "d'oh, I fixed it...". I seem to learn better when problems I don't understand are broken down and conceptualized[graphic images help a lot], which in scripting, I need some assistance.

I'm hoping TDN can be a place to go 'learn' what's going on with the engine and better enable me to 'help mysef'....

Michael \"Evic\" Wales   (Jul 02, 2005 at 02:01 GMT)

Awesome plan - I think the machine gun is not documentation itself, but the inability to find documentation.

Yes, the Google search is great, but me personally - if I want to learn something I don't really want to do it by reading someone else's code. If you lookup a function at php.net they give you the technical definition of a function, a small block of text explaining it in English, and then a few minor examples that achieve very little in themselves but focus solely on the function you are looking for.

If I want to learn how to make a keymap and bind the movement keys to my character, that's all I want to learn. I don't want to have to read through someone else's code on making a Tetris-clone just to figure it out.

Hopefully the TDN will straighten this out, but holy crap - how long does it take to make a wiki? It's not very hard... get it over with so we can use it.

Jody Byrd   (Jul 02, 2005 at 05:09 GMT)

I think one of the problems that stops games from being finished is a "Hobbist" versus "Indie" mentallity

I think of Hobbist as those who are happy coming home after work and playing around. A demo satisfies them.

I think of Indies as those who are serious about making games. They set goals. Plan their lives around coding. If you want to be an Indie, then you are gonna have to be persistent. If you aren't, the game wont get released.

But, I wonder if the label "Indie" is granted too often after somebody releases a game, so what would you call those serious developers who haven't?


I also think it would benefit Torque in the future to transform the tutorials into a training lessons. Its not good enough just to say, "here's how to mess around with some of the features, now you're own your own". It should be, "here's how to build the FPS Starter kit from the ground up, Step 1, Step 2,.." then, "now let's modifiy it into the Racer Starter Kit". And make it detailed, each lesson only applying 1 new feature at a time. That has got to help somebody. I know it would have helped me when I bought TGE 3 years ago.

Jody Byrd   (Jul 02, 2005 at 05:21 GMT)

Another thing, the Art has been my biggest obstacle with Torque. I'm not a modeller. I dont have the time to make my own models. And, I dont want to pay for an Art Pack unless I know it will work for me. Just think back to when you modded Doom,Quake, Tribes, or Half-Life. You didn't have to add new art resources that often because you had a cd's worth of them to choose from.


I think GG needs a "common art pack" that covers enough models that we can make games from. FPS, Racer, Flight Sim models. It ain't got to be the size of a cd, but enough
for us to get going. Since we have to sell our games thru GG anyway, they can control the art licenses for us till we're able to buy some ourselves.

Greg Szemiot   (Jul 02, 2005 at 05:36 GMT)

Well, I don't know about anyone else's projects... but my team has been working for 4 years on just the deisgn of an adventure series. This included religion, history, species of animals and plants, laws of science...

4 years of our lives, and the main people behind the series have all said they are not giving up.

The thing that bothers me, GG doesn't have a publishing platform for large games beyond the size of an arcade style game. If you guys offered a comparable service for adventure games, long engrossing ones, with some high sales numbers, we'd be all for it. Because right now, dealing with the likes of Nintendo, Ubisoft, and T2 is going on, but it's very slow.

Also... it woud help if, as a publisher, you guys would help with costs of development for projects with pomise. I mean, the Orb team only needs about 30,000 to get everything we need, and yet, we're having to turn to the state for grants.

Jody Byrd   (Jul 02, 2005 at 05:40 GMT)

And still thinking about it, it's not easy to rewrite games from one game engine to another. Period. Just because I can get most of my Quake levels into Torque, doesn't mean I can import the scripts just as easily. I myself have several games I've released over the years, but I dont want to spend time to rewrite them, and some of them are not suited for a 3d engine. Its just not worth the time spent as a lone developer. OK, random thought, but its one I've already faced with Torque.

I also think there should be more starter kits to build from. It would be nice to be in a project maker tool, click "new project", select the "FPS Game- Stand Alone, No Server" or the "FPS Game- With Server" icon, and my boilerplate starter kit gets written to my drive. And it would run and play without me editting it. This would give me a working game that all I need to do it change the maps/mission around to have my game idea ready for release. Its not for everybody, more serious games would still need serious work, but its enough for the lesser skilled or time crunched developers.

I think I'm done thinking about this now... stepping down off milk crate...

Chris Labombard   (Jul 02, 2005 at 05:53 GMT)

@Mathew Langley - You can lead a horse...

Brandon Pollet   (Jul 02, 2005 at 06:23 GMT)

I know this sounds like an excuse but the biggest hurdle for me has been art. I'm a very creative person but I cannot make a respectable art asset to save my life. So if I was to ask GG to give me another free game creation gift it would be a way to attract artists to a project. Maybe I'm just not using the community well enough, I'm not sure, but I've got to figure something out.

So yeah Pat, code me up a artist locater bot that I can set loose on the Intur-web to find a couple hot lady artists that are willing to work for future profits. :)

J.C. Smith   (Jul 02, 2005 at 07:02 GMT)

The #1 problem for me is also finding art. I've bought all of the art packs, but that can only get you so far without project specific artwork.
Edited on Jul 02, 2005 07:45 GMT

Ward De Langhe   (Jul 02, 2005 at 10:14 GMT)

My problems when i startedd out with Torque were (wich was back in 2001? or was it 2002 when torque was released first?):

-me being a total newbie in gamedev (even tough i worked on some MOD's etc)
-choosing the wrong people to work with
-seeing it all too big
-documentation


Now all those problems are behind me, I'm finally set to start producing some games. And that's what i'm doing, altough lately, little bugs in Torque have been "bugging" me, and they're really slowing us down (!).

Now, to all those people in need of art. If you have solid code and present a fun demo you should have no problems finding artists. If you can't find any interested artists it most likely becuase you are not presenting the idea good enough (can't present a playable demo, can't present the idea properly, etc). Most artists in this community have spend waaaay to much time working on just another failure, they want to make sure if they do something it gets out there (in the form of a finished game). And by the way, artists have an even harder time finding programmers (i've been there, but i just learned to program).

The problem is not that games aren't being made. The thing is games aren't finished up to the quality GG wants them in order to publish them. So, maybe people should put their game up for free download instead of abandoning it. What is happening waaay too often now is people finish their game up to 70-90%, then see how much work is left to "finish" it (publishing quality), and decide its not worth it. I believe at that point you should just release whatever you have as a free download and see how people react to it. If you get lots of repsonses like"please don't stop working on this", then get your act together and go for that final run.

Matthew Langley   (Jul 02, 2005 at 13:54 GMT)

@Chris: Ain't that the truth, lol. *shrug*

Alex Rice   (Jul 02, 2005 at 16:17 GMT)

@Pat Was that supposed to be inpirational or something?

Quote:

---

Is it just a waste of time and resources to continue to keep our primary focus on the indy community?

---

What kind of question is that? More of a slap in the face than anything else.

Many of the TGE license are probably owned by people like me who are like indy-squareds. Just 1 guy trying to hack something together in between demands of job and family. It could be years before I produce anything worth looking at.

I would say it's also discouraging seeing advertisements or .plans about things like the XSI dts exporter, and Torque Constructor, peope get all wet about it, and then nothing is heard for another 6 months afterwards. Give us a timeline at least.

Alex Rice   (Jul 02, 2005 at 16:20 GMT)

Quote:

---

Every year adds a large amount of resources...

---

I have complained about this in the forums, but if you actually surf through the Resources that are listed on garagegames.com a significant % of them are broken links, or defunct projects. Webmaster has some work to do.

Thomas Shaw   (Jul 02, 2005 at 16:22 GMT)

I have been working with Torque for a year now and I have to disagree that the documentation and tools are all shipe shape. Just read the forums: The documentation is AWFUL and incomplete - even the link to the 3ds max documentation is broken right now!

Yes, almost all of my problems are able to be solved by reading the forums, but the time it takes to locate the answers or wait for responses is time spent NOT making our game.

As an artist, it is obvious to me that the tools are created from the programmers perspective: something that is obvious and intuitive to them can be a real pain in the @ss for me. Perhaps that is why artists are hard to find working on Torque projects; I spend most of my time trying to figure out why my stuff doesnt work in the engine, and not doing the ART. My game co partner and I just spent a week trying to get transparencies to work right and finally gave up -- oops week suddnely gone for nothing.

Now that I said that, however, I think Torque is a pretty great deal for the price. And the community can't be beat. THanks for all the help guys.

David Montgomery-Blake   (Jul 02, 2005 at 16:36 GMT)

My key problem has been in delegating time. It's the reason that I decided quite a while ago that I was in the hobbyist category rather than the indie category. I neither have time to dedicate hand's down to game development (as I have a local film group that I work with and dedicate similar amount of time to) nor time committments for a team. If I don't have time to dedicate to a team, I don't waste people's time. Period. I wish more people would realize that.

The next hurdle is getting "the idea" and then prototyping it. Prototyping is a bitch, and it's extremely disheartening to realize that your big idea (or in my case right-sized ideas) just isn't fun. You can give it the best story, captivating characters, a huge background, support for millions of players, but if it's not fun, there's no reason to play it. And the "fun factor" is not some universal concept. It's a slippery concept. For an adventure game, coherent and well designed story, wonderfully integrated puzzles, and intruiging characters create the fun factor. In a vertical shooter, those elements would get in the way of actually playing the game. I watched the intro to Radiant Silvergun probably twice. I play it more than most games in my collection, but I skip the intro because it doesn't matter (and was added for the console port).

For artwork in the past, I've often taken Kork's UV map, reversed it in photoshop, and applied it to my "enemies". That gave me a visual distinction so that I didn't have to get caught up in the "I don't have art, oh woe is I" programmer art mentality. I create base levels in Quark that do what I need. They're not pretty, but they work. Once the basic gameplay is in place, they can be prettied up. I don't consider myself a good 3D artist by any means, but anyone can create functional art. You just have to get past the "how it looks" block.

It's like when I took a class on stone tool analysis. The major component of the class was learning to knap (banging rocks together to remove pieces suitable to make functional stone tools). My major block at the beginning of the class was that I had a preconceived notion of how my flakes were supposed to look. I felt that I was supposed to see an arrowhead or a spear point or some other functional tool in the flakes and so I reduced a large amount of obsidian and flint to rubble trying to get "the perfect flakes". Then the professor and a couple of graduate students set up a trampling exercise for a paper at a conference. They took off a number of flakes (which looked like 90% of my discarded ones) as perfectly good flakes. Seeing that, it broke down my preconceived notions of what they had to look like.

I think that a number of new developers want to see the final image of their game at the beginning, and if they can't get beyond that block, it doesn't even get started, let alone die at some indeterminant point before the project ends. The great thing about prototyping is that you get over this block, but the horrible thing is often realizing that your "really cool idea" isn't that much fun and having to make the choice whether to work to make it fun or table it and work on one of the other hundred thousand ideas. Making that decision is painful.

But it's worth it when you find that fun idea that works and can develop into something good.

James Dunmow   (Jul 02, 2005 at 16:54 GMT)

Gah! Not good when my comments get eaten. Just posted a lengthy comment and it's GONE. *poof*

Ah well. It was a ramble anyway. Here's the punchline instead.

You've only been around 5 years. Experienced and fully funded game developers in the commercial world can easily take 3-5 years to produce a game. So be patient. Indies have neither the time nor financial resources (or human resources quite often) to produce on the same sort of schedules. For most it's a hobby not a full time job, it's funded by what can be delegated to it after the family has been fed and the bills have been paid, and the people working on it have to be organized and get along naturally without the incentive of a paycheck.

With this in mind, I'm a bit shocked that anyone has produced anything so far. Period.

I know I'm going to take another 3-5 years at least working on my title. I'm sure others are in the same boat. It's way too early to be calling for the beef. In all honesty you've only really just gotten started. Believing any differently will cause much disappointment.
Edited on Jul 02, 2005 16:55 GMT

Jay Barnson   (Jul 02, 2005 at 17:44 GMT)

Here's my struggling viewpoint from a guy who's had the engine for a year (but only been developing on it for a few months - half of which I've been in crunch mode during my "day job" so I haven't been able to focus as much as I'd have liked).

I've been involved in several game development projects. I've worked on major retail games that have sold well over million units, and I've been involved in small indie projects that sold considerably less. I've worked on older console games, but nothing more recent than the Sega Dreamcast. I'm currently working on a Torque project, and I want to state for the record that I *AM* a fan of this engine. Any criticism I offer here is out of a desire to see the engine improve - for my own selfish purposes, as well as for others in the community.

So here's my take:

#1 - 3D is HARD.
It's at least an order of magnitude harder than doing a 2D game. And that's if you DON'T have a game with complex animation requirements (like human characters) - then it's even worse. Top that off with the fact that audience expectations of a 3D game are much higher than expectations for a 2D game, and you've got yourself in a pickle. This has already been addressed, but it bears repeating.

#2 - Multiplayer is HARD.
Kudos to Torque and the GG team for building a framework that is multiplayer throughout - if you are going to do a multiplayer game, using this framework and sticking to that foundation makes it about as easy as it's going to get --- but it's still anything from easy. It's also an order of magnitude harder than doing a single-player game. It has a major impact on design, coding, testing & maintanance, and even art assets (if you have a single-player game, you can blow your polygon budget on your main character, because you know there'll only be one... not so for multiplayer).

Of course, Torque encourages people to make multiplayer games because - well, it's THERE, you know, why waste it? But if someone chooses NOT to do a multiplayer game, they are still locked into the multiplayer paradigm from a code perspective. You still have to figure out what's being handled on the "server", what's being handled on the "client," and handling the communication between the two - including interpolation, synchronization, creation & cleanup, etc. There are additional problems that develop when working on a single-player game --- little stutters or timing issues which are completely forgiveable in a multiplayer game that are difficult to accept or correct in single-player.

This isn't easy for ME, and I've been doing this kind of thing for over a decade. Now, as I develop my familiarity with Torque, it keeps getting easier, but it's incredibly frustrating when you are trying to figure out why something is NOT working and realize it's because it's only being moved on the server.

#3 - Torque is a collosally complex beast, yet feels "unfinished" in certain areas
I don't know how different this is from Torque 2D. I heard comments about keeping the focus on just using the scripts in Torque2D to make the games, rather than touching the C++ code. In Torque, TorqueScript is quite nice, but that whole "order of magnitude" thing comes up again and again. There's a lot more complexity and behavioral requirements the players demand, let alone the developers. It's almost impossible to avoid touching the underlying engine - and it's a beast.

There are many elements of Torque that feel "incomplete" - like they are more there for demo purposes than usable for a finished game. The sound, vehicles, and lighting are probably the most obvious examples. The WheeledVehicle probably comes closest to being universally applicable (for cars), but even that won't let you do, say, a motorcycle. You are GOING to have to go in and create your own class, or do some massive modification to an existing class to make it work for any particular game you have in mind, unless you tightly restrict your concept to what Torque already does - and most people won't recognize those restrictions until they've been playing with the engine for several months. The Synapse Lighting Pack goes a LONG way to helping the lighting issues in Torque, but like most source-code patches, it's not trivial to merge into existing code (or to merge updates into it).

You really CAN'T do AI without reaching into the source code - that's not really a criticism, because AI requirements are extremely game-specific. But I think that represents a wall for some developers.

You can have power and flexibility, or you can have ease-of-use. Or you can offer both in a very structured, heirarchical manner. Torque attempts to do this, currently, by having two levels - the TorqueScript level for ease-of-use, and the underlying engine itself. One is too restrictive for most purposes, and the other is REALLY complex. Some kind of abstracted middle-layer would be REALLY useful. It sounds like there are some good ideas for how to do this on the roadmap for TGE 1.5, but that won't help us in the meantime.

[continued next post]

Jay Barnson   (Jul 02, 2005 at 17:45 GMT)

[continued from previous post]
#4 - Tools Paths
This is a problem in game development across the board - from the 100-developer EA teams to solo indies. I'm really looking forward to seeing the Torque Constructor, and I hope that it will clean up some of the issues related to level-building. I haven't played with the DIF-style issues too much, but I'm hearing reports of issues with rotation, with having two DIF maps joined by portals, etc. Some of these issues need to be resolved in the exporter, tools, or the engine itself. Whatever works. Anything to make it less frustrating for artists and level designers.

Some areas where I see the biggest deficiencies (for indies) is animation tools & paths, texture animation, interiors maps (like making a Quake / Doom-style interior-focused games). There may be others. I don't see these being insurmountable problems, and I wouldn't say they are unique to Torque.

#5 - Tutorials
There are some great tutorials on the GG site. This is something we need MUCH MORE OF. The tutorials seem to cover a lot of the basics pretty well, but we need a lot more resources focusing on some more specialized topics. This is something the COMMUNITY needs to be primarily responsible for, but GarageGames needs to be involved to organize & make these accessible, to officially 'sponsor' these tutorials (as they have DONE, I might add). But they also need to help edit, oversee, and in some cases maintain this information.

I know one of the things preventing me from writing a tutotial is my own self-consciousness about my ignorance. I don't know if I have solved things "correctly" - I just find some way to make things work, and many times I just figure I've hacked it up horribly into some kludge that should be handled differently. It would be REALLY nice if we could have some sort of structure in place where someone with greater knowledge could act as reviewers or editors for these before putting hem in place.

Maybe GG could assist in "organizing" the community this way - designating certain members of the community as community leaders, and deligating certain responsibilities to them. In exchange for their free service to the community, so long as they remain active they could perhaps be elligable for discounts on GG products or something.

#6 - Better-organized assets?
The "resource" section is a WONDERFUL area with lots of amazingly cool sources of free and cheap content, as well as code snippets and so forth. But a lot of it is hard to find (much better with the new, improved Search capabilities of the site, I should mention...!), has dead links, or is not incredibly appropriate for Torque users.

What would be "nice" is if GarageGames could also have some kind of a "sponsored resource" section, nicely organized, with very specific categories. DTS models, Maps / DIFS, Code Snippets, etc. Sort of like the Tutorials, but with a bit more maintanance, and with a bit more oversight, and possibly pulling those resources fully internal so that we don't have dissapearing content.

Organization of links for shops that specialize in selling indie game assets and tools might be handy too. Yes, this might be giving additional attention to competing products - but if some company is supporting Torque even indirectly, it's in some kind of partnership to help sell GarageGame's products. Places like 3ddiggers, ledwerks (if I spelled it right), etc. help GG. Yes, longstanding community members know of these places and can find them, but it woul be nice to have them front-and-center.

Gee, is that all?
Well, I've kinda moved from stating problems to suggesting less important improvements. This .plan seemed to invite brutal honesty. That's my assessment at this point. There is no such thing as a "perfect" solution out there, including Torque. I chose it after evaluating a lot of other engines (including the possibility of extending my own engine), and it was really the best solution out there for me. But I'd like to see it improved.

I am sure as time goes on and I go from "early development" into "production" stages I'll have a whole slew of new obstacles.

If I had to pick the ONE thing that is the most difficult thing to work with, it's the difficulty of creating a single-player game. You still have to treat it like a multiplayer game, and that's significantly more tricky.

Charlie Malbaurn   (Jul 02, 2005 at 18:32 GMT)

If you ask me, it's the learning curve marked with poor colaboration efforts. On top of that is time.

3D games take a lot of time. You take that and the fact that you need to find a bunch of people to pretty much work for free and then on top of that, the fact that there isn't much low cost solutions for project management.. Well, you have problems.

I think thats why 2D is getting done more then 3d. Smaller teams with faster result time.

I mean, look at Source and Unreal mode tools. They are free, and in a lot of cases offer better tools and more options and there isn't crap out there for mods. You have free access to shaders, facial expression tools, all the art bells and whistles and maybe 2 half life 2 mods.

I'm not making excuses because I never had any intention of making a 3D game. I'm just telling you what I've learned by myself and talking to others.

Rex   (Jul 02, 2005 at 18:56 GMT)

@Pat...at point pricing this low[with TONS of doin' it yersefin'], I'm curious as to what you were expecting to see on a Quarterly basis??

I have to agree somewhat in the comparrisons above to engines that distribute/package the 'tools', that make the process simpler. I know there'll be those that rant about 'you can't release anything' with the engines that are used mostly for MODding, and if you want 'ease of use' go there. Well, that seems to be another answer as to, "Why?". If the Mission Editor isn't friendly enough to allow for more of point/click structure and simply Everything needs scipting, don't expect to see things rolling down an assembly line...

...I mean, it sounds as if the profit margin on licenses isn't enough, or a saturation point has been reached in sales. And the next 'vein' of revenue stream was planned to be distribution and that's not developing??

I'm sorry if you feel as though time is being wasted...

Henry Todd   (Jul 02, 2005 at 19:37 GMT)   Resource Rating: 5

A lot of people responded to this post in the ways you might expect -- anger, frustration, confusion; the usual. But I think Pat Wilson has been kind enough to bring an important point to light in the community, something he didn't really have to do. Clearly GG is reconsidering if a primary focus on indy support is a viable idea, since they've seen very little to prove that it is. They've provided *excellent* tools and content paths (yes, you heard me, EXCELLENT TOOLS AND CONTENT PATHS -- all of you guys complaining about these things should consider spending some time on a real commercial engine, and I don't mean something in the Source price-range. Real commercial engines generally have TERRIBLE tools and content export paths, because the only people working with them are the people who wrote them; game programmers are notorious for making user interfaces that no one else can use and leaving hideous crash bugs in tools, possibly with a warning "remember not to press the green button" taped to the side of each workstation which uses that tool :P).

I think there are two major issues at hand, and at the bottom I've written up an idea regarding them. To skip the ranting and get to the ideas, go straight to item 3. Item 5 is some additional ranting about how people don't know what Torque is in the first place, even once they've purchased it.

1) Team size, project overlap, inflated ego.

There are lots of 1-2 man teams out there, and many of them are working on projects which probably look more or less the same as 100 others. You can only make so many versions of Zombie Hunter X17 before the concept becomes a little "blah," especially if every version uses mostly stock Torque artwork and has 1 or 2 levels. If we took a few of those teams making zombie-killer games and forced them to work together on ONE zombie-killer game then we might have some potential.

The problem here is that most indie developers are control freaks like myself (member of a 1-man team), and as such they refuse to allow anyone else creative control over their projects. I mean, that's why we're here, right? We could all go get mailroom-level jobs with major game companies, but most of us don't want to spend 13 years doing bugfixes for Deer Hunters 20 through 33 before we finally get to be the guy who draws curtains for Half-Life 7, with a potential for promotion to painting the poo onto the toilet shaders for Counter-Strike: Source: Again: Part 2: The Revenge of CS.

Nonsense aside, I think most of us would rather take our chances that we never make it into the game industry than actually take the hard route in.

2) The proffit factor

This one's a little stranger, and may sound like some kind of conspiracy theory, but I see it in action all the time on the forums. Many people working with Torque right now think they're going all the way to commercial release. 99% of them won't even get close. Hell, most them are totally out of that legue -- they really should be reading docs, playing with script, and posting their findings in public, not working on a secretive "must be released" project which won't ever happen. That's not even the real problem; most commercial games which are proposed don't make it to release either. The issue is that, since these teams assume they're going to the open market, they rarely share any of their (potentially unique and complex) work on Torque with the community. In the end, the team will break up, no product will be produced, and the world will never get to see whatever unique code changes they might have made.

If you don't buy this, take a look around the forums. A few weeks ago I saw a complete "newb" explain that he didn't want to post his script he needed help with because someone would steal his l33t ide0rz. Note that he still wanted someone else to solve the problem, but didn't want anyone to see what he'd done, which was probably a very minor alteration to some example script anyway. This event itself isn't the point, I'm simply saying that many people in the community see the community itself as a potential threat, and I think this takes a lot away from Torque as a whole.

3) "Wait, you mean you guys don't just follow the optimum business plan for your industry?"

We've got a serious concern here when one of the GG staff bothers to come down from on high and warn us, "hey, guys, we're staying this path for you and you're not giving us anything back."

GG isn't focusing on the indie community because they think that's what'll make them ten billion dollars next year. They're doing it for *us,* the guys who won't ever be able to afford the Source engine (or whatever you prefer).

In my opinion, we could seriously benefit by having a "Welcome to Torque" seminar presented by community members to new Torque SDK owners on a regular basis. I realize this would be a very large undertaking, but it would allow new users to get a feel for the community and what it can offer them (and hopefully, what they in turn can offer it). It would also be a much easier way to orient new owners to the unique development environment that is Torque without sending them on a difficult journey through the documentation -- not to say that the docs are poor, but they don't present a clear picture to a new user aside from telling them how to compile, export, etc.

Hopefully, users who went through one of these brief sessions would come out with an idea of how beneficial it can be to share your ideas -- remember, for every 1 you give, you may get 100 back.

Even more, the seminar could orient new SDK owners to the types of projects which are currently in the works, possibly giving them a direction to aim in ("I'm going to learn how to model and then get a position on the Zombie Hunter X17 team!" instead of "I'm going to learn how to do everything and then make a zombie hunting game by myself!"). The idea here is that we can get new users into the places where their skills will make a difference and they'll actually be able to start learning Torque immediately. With slightly more organized teams, we might even see a completed game or two, and the users will learn firsthand what game making is about, so when they leave their original teams they'll actually be prepared to start their own projects.

4) Change of Perspective.

When you first come into the Torque world, you're coming from a very harsh place. Game engines priced for uber-corporations; developer interviews detailing the intense hardships of building a product for one of these companies (loss of personal life, loss of work, and loss of deserved proffits often characterize these stories); half-functional hobbyist engines; SDKs seemingly designed to prove you're not intelligent enough to build a game (in other words, SDKs designed to be used only by HIGHLY experienced programmers who know their engines as well as various body parts they own).

A lot of people know what Torque is now, a lot more than did a few years ago, but I still find myself explaining what it is to audiences who are rarely willing to take me seriously about it.

What am I saying? Torque sounds too good to be true to the developer looking to plant his/her project in an engine. When I hear someone ask me, "what's a good engine to develop a game in?" I almost always suggest Torque. Usually, the person has never heard of it. Even more often, they lose interest when I tell them it's $100 and geared towards the indy developer. Not because they don't feel like paying $100, but because the reaction in their minds tends to be "what kind of engine is only $100 and designed for indie games? It must be crap."

Now, all this might change if I mention that Torque was previously known as Tribes when a little company called Dynamix was in charge of it, but only if the person was around for the Tribes Era. Really, Tribes was the selling point even for me; Even now if you ask me, "what is the best FPS game ever created?" I'll have no choice but to say, "why Starseige: Tribes, of course. Don't you know anything?" This is all good, you know, Torque having come from the best FPS game of all time, but unfortunately most people in 2005 are highly unlikely to cite the Tribes games if you ask them about cool FPS's. It's simply been too long, and as such it seems like it's time for Torque to get a new product example. I suppose this is exactly what PW was talking about in the original post, really; Torque needs a "killer app" so to speak for this new era in gaming, because only old guys like me remember the glory that was Tribes -- and technically it's not even an example of indie development success, since it was built under the backing of a major game producer.

5) "I assume I'll get what I pay for, so if I get more than that I'll probably throw some away."

Go look around in the forums again and see if you can't find some posts like "Torque isn't really an SDK" (or whatever the actual thread topic was) where the post author complains about how Torque is *too much* of a functional engine; he'd expected a pile of disjointed classes and vague engine functions in an SDK wrapper, not a fully integrated game engine complete with game demo, and as such actually feels like he was ripped off. Imagine: you go to the auto parts store and buy a transmission, and they accidentally leave a whole brand new car attached to it at no extra cost. Whoops! I guess the natural thing to do would be to take it back and complain that you can't use this new car to fix your old junker, right? Err...

I think that people who come into Torque are often expecting someone much different from what they get, and may be a bit overwhelmed by what the product actually provides, especially since there's no proper introduction to what Torque really is -- you simply enter your CC numbers and are presented with some download and compile instructions, the rest is more or less up to you.

I came into Torque with some knowledge under my belt, so to speak, but I was still overwhelmed. It took me around 6 months from when I first purchased the engine to actually start doing anything meaningful with it, even though I had page after page of game rule code I'd already written for another engine, as well as tons of artwork from my previous project ready to be converted. Get this: in a way, I was a little bit afraid to start poking at Torque. It wasn't until I'd let the underlying architecture sink in a bit -- the class hierarchy, the client/server setup, and so forth -- that I was actually able to do anything. Much of what I picked up during this incubation period was thanks to the forum posts and resources on this site, but I can say now that a good percentage of new Torque owners probably won't be willing to stick it out that long unless they have direction from the community or GG itself.

I think it's important that we catch these people before they become confused and overwhelmed; let them know what Torque really is and how many people there are here willing to help and they might stick around long enough to enhance the community. Worst case, they realize they've made a mistake and refund their purchase, but at least they make this conclusion early on, instead of spending two months working with the engine only to find it's not what they wanted and then throwing a hissy-fit (this kind of attention is bad, because the user will start to complain about how "Torque isn't appropriate for blah blah blah and etc," which is almost certainly untrue, but sounds rather convincing when the person has that much time invested).



Oh, by the way, I'd just like to say that I have a huge amount of respect for the GG staff for putting up with a community of crazy indie developers. Many of us are mean-spirited and have little consideration for the hard work that the GG team has put in to make indie game development a possibility (need I remind everyone that, pre-Torque, indie development was pretty much a joke?), but please remember that there are just as many of us who really appreciate what GG has done and are doing our best to create someone cool and unique with Torque.

I think most of us don't consider GG's situation simply because we don't realize there's a problem. When it's brought to light like this, it seems obvious, however before I read this post I wouldn't have assumed that a lack of indie projects was a serious concern in the GG offices. Of course it should be; you put resources and time into the community and it's only fair to expect that every now and then the community will spawn a project which serves as "proof of concept" for the indie development system. No new community project releases means no new funding for GG, if you think about it.

Anyway, I'd just like to remind the guys at GG that we are out there, we are working as hard as we can, and we are always ready to answer the call to battle should the forces of evil threaten the future of independent game development; we owe you guys at least that much. In light of this post, I will be at the upcoming IGC, and I will have something interesting to show for the time I've spent. I don't doubt there are others who will pop their heads up if you just issue the call.

Nathaniel Sabanski   (Jul 02, 2005 at 21:14 GMT)

Quote:

---

need I remind everyone that, pre-Torque, indie development was pretty much a joke?

---

You dont know what your talking about. Garage Games is a rising star, but it is still peanuts in comparison to many other 'bigger fish' indie devs out there.

Most indies dont even use Torque. Most use their own engines and technology adapted to their own styles of games they create and sell. You dont need Torque to make a hit, far from it. Have you ever heard of Popcap? Retro64? Reflexive Arcade? They all use their own locally developed engines.

What I suggest to Garage Games (if they want more games made in Torque) is that you get much more involved in serious indie communities like indiegamer, the ASP forums etc and advertise more to your target audience. Show them how Torque will make their lives easier as opposed to their own current frameworks and convert them.

If you do most advertising on gamedev.net, flipcode etc you are catering mostly to hobbyists and hot air, so thats what you are getting.


Not saying you should drop the hobbyists completely (If most of your sales are from the engine, you will want to keep them). But serious indie devvers are much rarer, thats just the way the world is.

Peter Dwyer   (Jul 02, 2005 at 21:33 GMT)

Tools tools tools.

Torque sounds great on paper and the demos all look great. The problem is that 90% of people who pick it up are soon left frustrated at the lack of any focused art and asset pipeline. So many time on these forums I have seen posts from newbies asking the same old question

What do I use to create levels?
How do I get a model into torque?
Where is the documentation?

The answers are usually along the lines of "Use Quark", Use max, The documentation is out there if you look hard enough. These are all plain and simply the wrong answers. What I would expect to be hearing is "Use the level constructor, We have a solid milkshape pipeline for models and there is a pdf manual you can download from X.

Quite a few Indies I know have bought Torque licenses and after trying to use the engine for a short while have simply walked away in disgust. Myk is sadly voicing the oppinion of many of the torque users, even if people like Matthew and Chris are in fanboy denial mode.

The sooner Constructor and other content creation tools are out there to support the efforts of Indies trying to use Torqe and TSE, the sooner you will start to see good solid Torque indie projects. It's that simple.

Alex Rice   (Jul 02, 2005 at 22:45 GMT)

@Pat - your .plan was mean to stir us up I know :-) One last comment, a constructive one

Regardless of whether the hobbyist/little indies get put on GG's "back burner", so to speak, and you game-dev-gods get back to doing what you do best (how it should be after all). Regardless...

IMHO Garagegames must hire a full time webmaster / technical writer. You (GG that is) need to run a link-checker on the website! You need to purge old dead Resources! You need to purge old dead Dev snapshots! You need need to consolidate all the many pieces of documentation and tutorial into one cohesive well formatted, edited whole.

That's nothing against (what's his name) who did the recent site upgrade with the layout and Google search appliance. That was an awesome job in a short amount of time. But as time goes on there is a lot of things about the site and the documentation that is crying out for attention.

Vince Gee   (Jul 03, 2005 at 00:33 GMT)

Hmm,

I've been using torque for about 5 months now. I'm building the RPGCore, which is a C++ implementation of managing player inventory etc. Why in C++ and not in script?

Well, even though the torque script is useful, I find it un-predictable at times because it doesn't catch all my logic mistakes and the debugger is kinda rough. I have yet to figure out how to implement the telnet debugger... so it's easier for me to step through the C++ than through torque script.

Next thing in my opinion is that Torque is a FPS engine. Before I bought the engine I emailed you guys and asked if a mmo could be built on it. The reply was that yes it could but it would take a tremendus amount of work. Well, I'm 60 percent to my goal of building the parts and I agree, it's a ton of work.

Right now the market is hot for MMO's with persistency. Torque lacks this out of the box, you have to add it... Built in database support for odbc would be nice.

Second, 3d games take soo damn long to build. I'm talking I work 4-8 hours a day on this, everyday. I'm well over 1000 hours and just starting to reap the rewards of my work... alot of the work you do, you don't see until your done and alot of people lose enthusasim and stop.

third, good dedicated (Well compulsive) programmers are hard to find. And what I mean by this is programmers who work night and day to build something that they build not neccessarily for profit but for the sheer accomplishment of finishing the project. It really does get difficult for me to sit at my computer and code day after day, if it wasn't for the community support I might have floundered already.

The last and most important thing in my opinion which makes torque projects fail is the lack of a GREAT torque script editor w/ intellesense, console method exposers etc. Alot of the time I end up looking for a console method in the C++ code because it's an undocumented function. This really eats into my dev time. (BTW, if I ever finish this project, my next one is this editor...)

The engine is class AAA, but the tools are kinda class A maybe class BBB. You have to remember, that even though you have a ton of licenses out there, a great deal of them are in the hands of younger people who lack the staying power it takes to build a game. They get fustrated and put it down. Thus if I were to make a guess about your license owners, I would say the majority of them are around 16-21 who expect instant gratification. Torque is not instant gratification, thus they drop the ball.

If you really want to see why your not getting games then I think it's time to add polls to your website for registered members. The forums are great and you guys really do respond and fast, but it's a mishmash. Where as if you ran polling campaigns(ECRM) you could start with a wide question and narrow it down over time to get the specific answer you want.

So, in my opinion, and this is not meant to be anything more than constructive, the lack of polling your license owners is causing your problems. GG is unable to determine which direction the engines need to go and/or decide if you need to seek a different market.

So, to summarize...

Engine - GREAT!!! AAA product!
Interfaces - Ok, usable, sometimes a little confusing. (More canned gui' objects would be nice)
Community interaction - GREAT, Responsive, always straight to the point!
Community Polling - Sub par.... FFF, non existent.

Just think what you could do if you would be able to determine a feature that you thought everyone loved didn't amount to a hill of beans compared to another feature... you could save all that time!

Vince

Vince Gee   (Jul 03, 2005 at 00:35 GMT)

oh, and one other thing,

If you want to see what players REALLY want right now, why not find the resources w/ the highest post counts. I mean if they have a ton of posts it must me alot of people are interested in them... right?

Mark Barner   (Jul 03, 2005 at 13:42 GMT)

What would help the beginner make a game:
- completed and accurate documentation
- more tutorials like Torque 2D
- more books on making games with TGE
- release of Constructor (tired of the light leaks)

Our game will be released "soon" (GG definition of soon) ;)... actually we have another year or two to go. I only get 2-3 hours a night to work on it. Lot of us have to work a day job 40 -50 hours a week. Being a single father of two... I still find time to work on a game. I have a TGE,TSE and Torque 2d licenses. There is one major thing that stuck out when I bought T2D, and that was the "getting started" documentation. I had a prototype game up and running with T2D in two weeks. First thing I said was that I wish they had done the same thing with TGE and TSE.

I would highly suggest as others have... take some polls on what may be causing the lack of games being made. This would be a better way than this plan.
Poll suggestions:
* years of game dev?
* how many games have you made? Created a thread for this.
* what do you think GG needs to improve on:
- documentation
- tutorials
- tools
- public relations
* how many team members working on your game? Created a thread for this one.
- one
- two
- 3 to 10
- 10 to 50
- 51 or more
...etc.

Just try it and see what happens.

Community member since 2001. Purchased eight items from GarageGames... three of them game engines.

edit: spelling
Edited on Jul 04, 2005 21:57 GMT

Bryan Edds   (Jul 03, 2005 at 14:07 GMT)

See my .plan in response to this plus a BONUS RANT here. :)
Edited on Jul 03, 2005 15:04 GMT

Eli Curtz   (Jul 03, 2005 at 15:21 GMT)

"Three months until IGC 2005. We've got a lot of stuff to show off, do you?"

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

I haven't done anything with the Torque license I bought four years ago. Mostly because I have far too many projects and a full time + programming job. I bought Torque, the RTS kit, and some art resources to support you guys, and Indie development in general, not because I think I'll actually sit down and write a game in the next six months.

What has Garage Games produced in those four years to inspire me?
The RTS starter kit.
Updates to the core engine.

That's it. Where's the beef, indeed?

But GG released a brand new shader engine. - No they haven't, they released a beta, Windows only, more than a year ago. I'm on a Mac.
But GG released a new modeling tool. - As far as I know it isn't even in Beta.
But GG has all those cool new tools, Torque 2D, the show tool, Tim's sweet content packs. - All of these were developed or originated OUTSIDE Garage Games and brought into the fold.

Garage Games is, compared to most of their users a quite large and well funded company. Do you seriously wonder why more Torque games haven't come out yet?

Nmuta Jones   (Jul 03, 2005 at 16:51 GMT)

Torque is awesome. Yet the major barriers for me have been:

NOT ART IN GENERAL, BUT TORQUE'S VERY CHALLENGING ART PATH SPECIFICALLY.
In every other engine I've worked with, it takes usually 30-45 minutes to learn how to get an animated character into the game and control animation sequences with code. In Torque, I've been working on it for at least 20 hours so far. I finally found the smdlabs video tutorials. This has helped tremendously. But let's be honest, the Torque art path is very very tough. CHARACTERS AND INTERIORS are two beasts that can drive you mad when trying to develop art for Torque.

NOT LACK OF DOCUMENTATION, BUT THE SPRAWLING, UNORGANIZED NATURE OF IT
This is self-explanatory! I think we all agree on this one.

That's it! I'm committed to get past these obstacles, but I can see how for some developers, these barriers could slow or shut everything down.

The art path is the #1 reason that many other developers I know decided against Torque from the very beginning.
Edited on Jul 03, 2005 16:53 GMT

Joe Maruschak   (Jul 03, 2005 at 17:48 GMT)   Resource Rating: 5

I wanted to make a comment that at this very moment, steps are being taken to improve the documentation, and specifically, a reworking of the art docs for DTS shapes, with a whole slew of new tutorials. I just wanted to assure everyone that we are aware of the documentation issues, and we are working on a solution. I also want everyone to understand that creating really good documentation and tutorials is not an easy project to undertake.

It would be really helpful if those that are having problems with the art path could help us out and tell us specifically where in the art path docs that you are encountering problems. When I first wrote the 3dsmax dts docs long ago, I did not know who the audience was, so I wrote the docs for someone like myself (experienced game artists).. those that are experienced game artists usually think the DTS docs are sufficient to get them up and running. They are not all encompasing, but they give the information they need to get stuff working. They are not good enough, and we are working on it.. but we want to make sure that we get all the information necessary in there and have them formatted in a way that makes them easy to read and use.

what would be really helpful to me is to understand the experience of those who find the art path hard. I would like to know how you came to the site, what your experience was, and how you felt about it. I also want to know what sort of experience you expected to have and what experience you WANT to have when looking for information. Knowing how all of you would like this information laid out will help us immensely in determining how all the information is collected an arranged.

Note that this undertaking on our end is pretty large. There is a LOT of information that has to be sifted through, condensed, worked into a document/tutorial.. images need to be made, arrange, explanations written...etc..

The feedback so far has been great. We are working on our end on the art tools and the docs. We expect that after we do this we won't be hearing as much complaint and, hopefully, will be seeing more games.

Sean H.   (Jul 03, 2005 at 17:51 GMT)

i'm one of those one-man teams others were talking about before. Ive had the torque demo for 4 months. i plan to write my first two games entirely in script just to show others the possibilities if you put your mind to it. why havent i produced a game yet? to put it simply, torque is hard. theres a very steep learning curve involved. 3d programming is hard. indies need day jobs. considering most licences out there are owned by one-man teams, its really no wonder to me that not many games have been produced yet. add to this that many of these people are probably programmers who refuse to create anything until they fully understand all the source code which introduces a 6 month to a year prep period prior to any development.

being the only person working on my game, i see all the things that Im going to have to do. im going to have to take care of all the artwork; 2d and 3d, animations, music, sound fx, gui, background story, plot, and oh yeah coding the damn thing. if most developers are like me and want to produce something halfway decent it's going to take alot of time. the upside is, im confident that once i get the first game completed, ill have a library of scripts that can be recycled and used to write all subsequent games speeding up development.

Hokuto   (Jul 03, 2005 at 18:56 GMT)

The writing below is purely constructive comments.
I support TGE/TSE/T2D and will keep working with this technology as long as I see progresses being made by GG...

You see...actually... it is not a matter of...Should GG keep supporting indie developers?
The question shuould be... Is GG doing the right things, in the right way, at the right time for the Indie Developpers to keep supporting GG financially, morally, investing their TIME and MONEY in GG products...?
We are the customers... remember? We are the ones that pay money here...
anyway.


mmm... well if you look at 3D Game Studio they have a lot of published games...
A LOT OF PUBLISHED GAMES, they have a lot of WIP happening as well...
So they have some BEEF... Why ?
Surely NOT because their users are twice as clever as Torque users...surely not!
and surely NOT because their engne is better/different/or what ever...NOT!
I did choose TGE/TSE over 3DGS as I prefer Torque...

BUT
I think it is because you can get 3DGS and go through their easy to follow tutorials!!!!!

Their scripting tutorials show you how to make a simple game, use 3D characters, give them weapons/powers, shoot etc...And they have an official IDE for the scripting language
And other tutorials show you how to make a level, make it playable etc....
They had their own Map Editors for ages and as far as I hear it is good at what it does....
Some people will attack this... and say... hey, with Torque you can CHOOSE which IDE and tools/editors to use, is a matter of having choice and not being forced to use a specific tool, it is about having flexibility....

Yeah... maybe...mmmmm.. yeah right!
What we have is people not only trying to get their head around Torque... but also trying to get their head around how to use 3rd party tools/IDE/Editors and how to use them with Torque!
A LOT of work newbies have to go through before they can even start to produce evne the most basic content.
Flexibiltiy? Where? As far as I know Torque is not that flexible when it comes to which 3D package file format to use... as not many enjoy a fully working and solid performing exporter.
Flexibiltiy? Torque does not read any other format (.x fbx etc..) other than its own.
Ok... just in case people were going to attack my with this thing about lack of tools = flexibilty !



Matthew "King Tut" Langley. I have the outmost repsect and gratitude for you as your T2D tutorials are a God send.
The getting started tutorial for T2D is great as well...
I think I have seen more new WIP content for T2D since it came out than new WIP TGE/TSE in the same timeframe.

GG, you have to make it easy for people to use your engine... just as much as you make it easy for people to buy it.
I always see posts from users... how do I get my own 3D models or animated model etc.. into Torque...
That means that there is no Dummy Proof tutorial/documentation to get basic things done.

most of us here, work on/with Torque during our spare hours, as someone else mentioned, after we took care of family, bills etc...
What we need is easy access to Torque Power, and I don't mean a Make Game Stupid Button.
I mean clear documentation and tutorials that teach newbies how to get into Torque and start making a simple game for the user to build on. (Again, the T2D getting started tutorial and Matthew tutorials are a good example)

I mean allowing people to get their content straight into the game with the minimum troubles, for example having Torque to be able to read standard format like direct .x... so no matter what 3D package you use you can create content and load it into Torque. (like other indie level engines do)
Having an engine that is solid and feels finished instead having an engine that is rough around the edges + a couple of Early Adopter engines... The EA engine may be in a state that is a bit too early to use and invest development time on...and TGE needs a lot of fixes (from what other people says.. I havent fixed anything on it yet)



The people behind Rocket Bowl spent I think 18 months on the project, on and off.
They had at least one full-time programmer who was able to keep working on the game!
Overall a team of 4/6 people... paid by the company to work on the game
QA time and a Budget of $150,000

Marble Blat I think was created by GG...

In both cases after all those hours of work... all GG managed to create with their own engine was a marble blast type of game that even then required custom code (for a ball hitting a few stars here and there). And even GG opted to not go for a Multiplayer option (on a Mutliplayer based engine) because If I remember well it would have been too complicated to refine/change Physics to work wall in Mutliplayer

and Large Animal Games (RocketBowl) spent 18 months and $150,000 to make another simple looking game where all you do is shoot a ball to hit some pin!
Well games with balls is maybe all you can do when you have to use Milkshape to create models for your game because better tools are not supported... maybe... I could be wrong

So if it took so much hard work to use Torque to create games like RocketBowl and MarbleBlast, how do you think ONE MAN BAND indie developer or part-time teams of indie developers are going to be able to use the same technology and tools and create better games than those two and quicker??!?!??!?!?

So you (GG) are surely working hard to improve on all fronts and give us more and more and we love you for that

You need time to fix TGE? To complete Constructor? To add features to T2D and TSE....?
Well, guess what, we need time to learn to make good use of Torque, to find and settle with a productive pipeline, to start, add features and complete our Torque based games...

Patience my friends :)

Jorgen Ewelonn   (Jul 03, 2005 at 20:16 GMT)

Quote:

---

Is it just a waste of time and resources to continue to keep our primary focus on the indy community?

---

boy, you sure know how to stir up the crowd.. ;)

The relentless reactions in this plan really points out one thing, there's alot of energy in this community. No doubt does alot of this energy also find it's way into the creations one might or might not see.
What strikes me is that perhaps some nice and clever market research needs to be done to find out where the product and it's compnents ought to be heading. What has to be added, refined or removed to fit the intended consumer.
This seems to be hinted in above, just tought I'd point it out.

Pat, don't ever loose that uncompromising attitude, I love you for it ! :D

Matt Vitelli   (Jul 03, 2005 at 21:27 GMT)

I think Torque is an excellent engine. I used to think it was just your everyday average engine, but now when I play all these games that had an engine made from scratch and take years to make I sometimes wonder..."What if they had just done it in Torque? Then their game might have been released 6-12 months earlier." Unfortunately there are a lot of people on Garage Games that think Torque is a crappy, average engine. I used to be one of them...now I'm more neutral. I don't care what engine I use, just as long as I get it done fast and good results. I think a lot of people doubt it just because of it's $100 price. Also, I think it's really interesting how some of this new technology hasn't been used in the past. I mean, I haven't seen many (if any) people using prerendered textures. I mean, now that I started using Bryce for .dif textures and skies for Torque, my Torque art has definately improved. It's amazing how fast you can get things done now days. Now instead of using QuArK you can have the user-friendly Cartography Shop and export .maps and .difs with ease! I'm surprised more people haven't completed Torque projects so quickly yet. Then again I don't have a full-time job or any job for that matter so I just mess around with Torque all day! :)

-Matt

Jeff Tunnell   (Jul 03, 2005 at 21:43 GMT)

I'm on sabbatical and I'm not supposed to be working on GG stuff:) But, this thread needs a response.

Pat was not speaking for GG when he intimated that we might drop the Indie community. While we have spread our risk around a little more with creating our own games, commercial and goverment sales, etc., you can rest assured that as long as the founders fo GG are still in control of the company we will be supporting indies, hobbiests, personal and educational markets.

However, Pat was voicing a feeling that pervades GG, i.e. where are the games? While he didn't even come close to naming all of the games that have been completed, there are still many less games than we anticipated. As somebody stated, that was the entire basis of my IGC keynote last year.

We have many products that are under NDA that are being created by professionals. These are people that could use Renderware, NDL, Unreal, etc., but choose to look beyond the low price and truly examine the power of Torque. These products are being created by professional indie (and in many cases publisher funded) companies. You will see more and more of these products coming to market over the next year.

Of course, for the hobbiest side, much of the blame can be put on GG. If we had millions of dollars in VC$ we could simlutaneousloy tackle all of the upgardes, tutorials, documentation, and education that people are looking for. We don't have the luxury, however, so over time, we will have the best tools, processes, etc. While this will make the market bigger for our products, I don't think it will result in more games.

It is amazing to me the amount of entitlement people are expecting from a $100 software product. Not only do people expect powerful software, they expect us to teach them how to program, how to be artists, how to build their teams, and how to publish their products. The thing is.... we are happy to do that. When I get back, we will be working on initiatives that will help in these areas, but all of this takes time, and is very much outside the scope of shipping a good game engine.

My observation is that people tend to work on the wrong things. Instead of having a simple, fun idea, they drill down to some technical aspect of their product and spend a lot of time working on a small graphical effect or demanding huge terrains, or asking why TGE does not support MMOG out of the box, or "where are the shaders?", or what ever the latest shiny object is. I have pleaded with people to work on their games and not worry about these small "features.", but my opinion mostly seems to fall on deaf ears.

But, I don't want to point fingers. GG WANTS to see community created games. For our part, GG will continue to make TGE products better, easier to use, and more polished. Around those products, the educational effort will expand with wikis, seminars, books, tutorials, trade shows, etc. If you choose to build your gaming efforts around GG products, you are in good hands. GG is committed to the future, and our products reflect that.

-Jeff Tunnell
GarageGames, Co-Founder

Ben Garney   (Jul 03, 2005 at 22:07 GMT)

Well said, Jeff.

We will improve the quality of our products, documentation, community, etc. until every developer here has no choice but to succesfully make a game. ;)

Hokuto   (Jul 03, 2005 at 22:09 GMT)

Great stuff Jeff.
Top notch response.

As I said before... as long as GG keeps working on it I will keep supporting GG, buying their products and use their tech to create a few games (with time).

Also, if professional indie companies are using TGE to make games that they will be releasing over the next year, that will be a boost for the whole community and serve as part of the beef Pat is wondering about :)
With time. us mini-indie or hobbist-indie will provide the rest of the beef so we can all have a BBQ by the end of next year!!!!

Pat is also cool btw,
actually if you think about it... I'm sure everyone in this community must have had that same question at one point or another.
I'm sure everyone here would like to see more games made with GG..
So it is all good:)
Edited on Jul 03, 2005 22:13 GMT

Anton Bursch   (Jul 03, 2005 at 22:33 GMT)

My observation is that people tend to work on the wrong things. Instead of having a simple, fun idea... - Jeff Tunnell

I was about to write my thought on this issue when I read what Jeff had to say above. My thought was that my biggest obstacle to making a game is figuring out what game to make and even more importantly what game can I make with torque.

I know that there are a lot of capable people in this community that have the determination and the skills to make an indie game using torque. I am one of them. But what game should we make that we can make with torque? That is a harder question than it looks like.

I have tried to make simple games with torque only to find that a core feature of my game design was not a feature already in torque and was in fact something big enough that my game was no longer just a 'simple, fun idea'. Of course this is NOT in any way a fault of anyone especially not Garage Games or the Torque engine. It's just something that happens. I didn't understand the torque engine enough to know what I could make with it right out of the box. And... when you are a one man or two man team... the often quoted "you can get torque to do anything you want by just programming it yourself" is definitely not always a reasonable solution. Many are only going to be able to make a glorified mod with torque. So... what kind of mod can we make?

That is the question that I have been trying to find the answer to thru 2 years of trial and error. Of course the answer is different for different people who bring different skills to the table. But to be honest, for me, I think that it is going to have to be a multiplayer first person shooter game. Which is THE type of game that everyone says NOT to make because there are too many already. But what other game CAN I make with torque as a one or two man team?

This is just my thoughts about this issue and they are very specific to my experience with torque. I am NOT whining... I am just being honest. I DON'T think that I have anything figured out or that my opinions are THE reason that more games aren't developed. They are just MY reasons why in 2 years I still haven't finished a game. Cause... you know what... I put in the time and the work... I just need to find that right game to make. And yes Ideas are a dime a dozen... but Ideas that are actually feasible are much more rare.

Clint S. Brewer   (Jul 03, 2005 at 22:46 GMT)

well said in both posts Hokuto

Quote:

---

Jeff said: It is amazing to me the amount of entitlement people are expecting from a $100 software product. Not only do people expect powerful software, they expect us to teach them how to program, how to be artists, how to build their teams, and how to publish their products.

---

I'm sure some people feel entitled to this, but when most of us ask for better documentation we are just telling you what you need to know to make your customers, Us, happier. I'm assuming all of us paying for the engine in someway helps GG continue to exist, and if not, how can I get in on some of that sweet money stash? When you make us happier by making your product better you get more customers, because 1 we are so damn happy, and 2 your product is so much better.

@Joe,
[quote]It would be really helpful if those that are having problems with the art path could help us out and tell us specifically where in the art path docs that you are encountering problems. /quote]

Joe I really respect you for taking the attitude you did in this thread, very professional.

Something that would help GG improve would be to ask people how their experience is and what you could do to improve it. Send out a survey, anonymous if possible, find out what people want. there are a lot of vocal people in the forums but I'm sure you have many more quiet users who would have some good input. Let us know that you are really interested. Discussions about improving TDP shouldn't feel confrontational, and too many times they do.

Respect the time your customers spend to tell you what you need to do to make them and your future customers happy.

[edit] as to the original question:

The iron maiden of game development is your machine gun. She will not stand for inexperience and feeds on ignorance spitting out empty shells of great expectations.

Here's to hoping my game makes it through the trenches. cheers!
Edited on Jul 03, 2005 22:52 GMT

Hokuto   (Jul 04, 2005 at 08:32 GMT)

I just wanted to add that I mean no disrespect to GG or Large Animal about their ball based games.
Those were the games they made because that was their choice of course.
I'm sure (I mean look at Tribes) that the engine, GG and Large Animals can make deeper and more advanced games if they wanted to.

In the case of Marble Blast it was an example of how to make a casual game with potentially mass market appeal and the same actually was for RocketBowl. Large Animal is a developer of casual,online, potentially mass market games I think, so they used Torque to create exactly the game they needed and wanted to create...

So to make it clear, the capabilities of TGE and the skills of GG and Large Animal were not in question, I just used those two titles as an example of finished and published products that took the time and the human resources they took. So using those as a reference it would be easy to understand how long it would take a smaller and less experienced team of deveopers to also complete or even take a game to alpha status.

What the hell even two of my game ideas (one for TGE and one for T2D) are ball based!!!!!!!!
:)

Gareth Fouche   (Jul 04, 2005 at 10:45 GMT)

Honestly, I think it is the nature of a lot of the "indies" themselves.

You can do all the re-arranging of the engine you want, but game development is still amazingly hard. It will never be easy. Trying to create a game while earning a living/attending high school/university etc is tough. And few people have the endurance.

There are simply too many people starting doing it because games are "fun", but when it comes time to do hard, thankless, unpaid slog for upwards of a year or two, they give up.

We complain about the "crunch time" in the industry, but that is what you are looking at as an indie, at least in the beginning. A very long crunch, with no paycheck, for a very long time, on the hope that you can maybe make it and quit your day job. Few people have the endurance and dedication, few people actually realise what they are getting into/have to sacrifice and few people scale down their dreams to whats actually possible.

The result, a plethora of unfinished projects.

There are indies out there who have written a game from scratch, taken it to market, and made a living. It can be done, and TGE makes it significantly easier. Its not the tech, its the people themselves. I don't really want to insult anyone, but thats my honest opinion.

That being said, hopefully I myself can go the distance. I have the deepest respect for those that have.

Uiriam   (Jul 04, 2005 at 11:20 GMT)

I'd like to give my opinion (sorry my poor english).

I think the biggest problem of a newbie using Torque is the missing documentation about all its components(like a SDK) and the nonexistence of tools to do things like a simple path, road in the terrain or adjust vehicle physics, for example. Maybe, Torque Constructor will solve all this problems, but about source code, we need more information about the engine.
Edited on Jul 04, 2005 11:35 GMT

Bryan Edds   (Jul 04, 2005 at 11:27 GMT)

Heh, my game is marble-based :) Boy was it difficult to make a story based on marbles, but I pulled it off in what I think is a grand style.

I think that indies would pump out more games if they were better able to / would decide to right-size their games to their ability. But before they can do that, they must spend perhaps several months finding out what their abilities really are - which is probably a big killer for many people.

Keep the faith, keep your day job, and right-size your game to your personal abilities (after the long abilitiy-discovery process). That's a good start I think.

And one more thing -

Get 'er done!

Brett Fattori   (Jul 04, 2005 at 17:08 GMT)

Pat has some magical ability to re-publish his blogs... interesting...

Anyways, my initial comments are here.

I was well underway with ChopperSim before I realized that there isn't a simple way to make a game of that size as a single developer. I didn't have the $$$ to get good artwork, so I made it myself. I was also learning the engine and it wasn't a simple thing. I even tried paring the idea down to a simple game, but that didn't make it any easier. There's a lot to TGE/TSE... T2D is wayyyyy simpler. Yeah, I could probably pump out a game in T2D in very little time -- but I'm also busy now with life, work, and dRacer.

Games are coming... some people really are committed to this, Pat et. al. I realize it's been since 2001, but the engine has been maturing over that period. Yeah, some people think that they have to have the latest and greatest engine enhancements before they can release, so they will always be waiting to release.

Others are trying to make HL-2, or even Tribes, as a group of 3 guys and it's just not gonna happen in a short timespan. Games can be modded much easier than an engine can be reprogrammed. Most modders are familiar with drawing up some guns, some new visuals, and laying down some script-code. Unless people have modded stuff like Quake (which stayed very true to C/C++ dev) then they don't understand the complexity that comes with re-writing major portions of an engine.

Yes, GG has provided the tools. Yes, people are working on games. No, games aren't going to start multiplying like mice. Good games take time and great ideas aren't easy to come by. Give it some more time and see what happens.

- Brett
Edited on Jul 04, 2005 17:08 GMT

Vashner   (Jul 04, 2005 at 21:57 GMT)

I just need the future Torque 2D book... today :)


I still want to do Realm Wars 2d too....

Michael Cozzolino   (Jul 04, 2005 at 23:03 GMT)

Quote:

---

My observation is that people tend to work on the wrong things. Instead of having a simple, fun idea...

---

- Jeff Tunnell

I totally agree but I think many of the old timers are realizing this and have switced gears. I'm very optimistic about the next couple of years as far as quality and quantity of games.

Vashner   (Jul 05, 2005 at 00:20 GMT)

I think T2D has a "big picture" problem. At least for me it does. The info is there but it's hard
for me to learn that way. When customers say "documentation" what the really mean is
"how do I make it go"? There is so much awesome stuff on the forums that all the T2d staff
and associates have ROCKED on.. it's uber. I have found people have different ways of learning.

For the more math / text folks it's easy to look at what's on the forums and doc's and go oh...
I get it T2d.. For people like me that need books with pictures (redneck ... little humor folks)..
I can't get the big picture. And to me that's how I build things from the bottom brick. I can't find
that brick yet with T2d. I can see it but it's kinda fuzzy like underwater.

..

Derk Adams   (Jul 05, 2005 at 02:42 GMT)

Well, since this seems to be a wildly popular topic, I figure I'll throw my hat in the ring.

I think the biggest issue is developer maturity. I started in a different engine and "learned" that true game development is not "fun." It is interesting and enjoyable, but it is a lot of work. Game engines are touting how "easy" it is to make your own game, but it isn't. It requires dedication and motivation to get you through the tough times. Most people want to make a game that looks like the blockbusters out now, not realizing that thousands of experienced man-hours went into development. Since most games are art driven, developing that volume of art is very difficult for the indy project. The games have to either have less art or a lower level of art.

I've been using Torque for a year now, and I just figured out how the main system works (not necessarily all the sub-systems). I've been developing my game for two years and figure I have at least another two years befor I'm completed. Then it's an isue of getting all the art content created.

Thanks.

J.C. Smith   (Jul 05, 2005 at 04:32 GMT)

One of the simple game types that could be created without a lot of effort is the puzzle styles games that have made Popcap so popular. I made an attempt to prototype some of these in Torque a few months ago, but (I described this in the forums a while back also) I was unable to ever get a noticeable delay when creating objects in real time. There was always a pause even if I did a schedule with a delay of 1 or tried to create immediately. Now I'm sure some C++ modifications could fix this, but I hacked away for about a week and couldn't figure it out and moved on to other projects.

Bryce "Cogburn" Weiner   (Jul 05, 2005 at 04:59 GMT)

I am an IT professional, not a game developer or manufacturer. I have not been trained neither professionally nor formally on game design, concepts and theory. I do, however, play games, have some experience w/ 3DSMAX and can program in C++ enough to be dangerous. I wrote one phenominally (within its genre) successfull web-based game that I thought deserved its own 3D environment. That lead me to TGE.

I am a professional so I want anything I do to look professional too. If that means that I have to buy TGE, learn TGE, learn game design, theory, etc... It's going to take a while. I then must prototype my game idea, while learning how do to that mind you, and at the SAME time attempt to attract others to see the potential of my idea and help make it their own.

This all takes time. If it takes 5 years for my game to be completed, so be it. Don't rush it... or us.

The games will come.
Edited on Jul 05, 2005 05:00 GMT

Sebastian Potter   (Jul 05, 2005 at 07:00 GMT)

Jumpin' John Carmacks, what a great discussion.

I used to work for Sierra at the time of Tribes, though I never met any of the Dynamix guys, I followed their work on Earthsiege from pretty much day one, and when it became Starsiege and then Tribes, I was hooked. The engine really impressed me.

So, five years later, I find myself a TGE licensee, putting together a game that I expect to be finished in 2007. I started design in early 2004, and I'm just at the prototype stage.

I'm lucky in that my partner is a very talented artist. One major hurdle down.

I chose TGE for a number of reasons. Power, flexibility, community, support. Oh, and cost, because if it didn't work out, I can write off $100, but I can't say the same about different engines.

The reasons that I'm now evaluating other engines comes from my experience with TGE over the past months, mostly as a result of trying to protype some very basic game ideas.

1. Documentation. I've worked on projects that dwarf the TGE codebase by orders of magnitude, and I've never encountered such slapdash, incomplete, outdated and scattered documentation. I'm glad that GG knows this a problem and is fixing it, because if they didn't think this was a problem I'd have serious issues continuing with TGE.

2. Tools. I know that some people think that users complaining about tools are making excuses, but when even GG acknowledge that the art pipeline is deficient, something has to be done. DTS modelling is pretty reasonable, with a wide choice of community-supported exporters. GG could do more officially support tools, but DTS is ok. However, interior art tools are abysmal, and nobody should ever have to suffer through the use of QuArK. Terrain editing is right pain as well, but at least it's done in-engine.

3. Information. As the GG website is the primary source of information for the community, something pretty dramatic needs to be done to fix it. I'm appaled by the number of broken links (even internal links to documentation!), and the terrible categorisation of information. Nothing frustrates me more than when I think I've found the information I need on this website only to have the page missing, or the resource download unavailable. GG needs to outsource redevelopment of the website to people who know what they're doing, and not to try to do this internally. Sorry guys, but being able to make kick-ass games isn't the same thing as knowing how to organise and present information in a clear and consistent manner.

EDIT: Damn comment system that just eats posts. If I hadn't pressed ctrl+c by instinct before hitting submit, well, I wouldn't be happy at all. :(

4. Tutorials. The lack of official learning resources really put me off, right from the start. I'm used to getting elbow-deep in a system, and I'm coming to understand TGE now, but the lack of decent tutorials covering what the engine does has probably wasted a good six months of my time. Please get a good technical writer, someone with experience in writing training programmes, and give them access to enough GG staff to write some killer tutorials. Use the most popular resources on the GG site as the basis for what the tutorials should be about.

5. Communication. What's going in TGE 1.4? When will it be released? When will Constructor be released? What's the feature set? Maybe the 4 issues I noted above are actually in the process of being fixed, maybe every single niggle I have with TGE will be fixed in 1.4. The problem is, I don't know. Information that isn't communicated effectively just might as well not exist.

6. Support. I've filed two bug requests with Tim Aste's content packs, and enquired about their progress. No response for a month. Not happy about spending double the cost of TGE on official