Road to IGF and Community Weekend

Firstly, Minions of Mirth was recently featured at Gamasutra here: "Road to IGF: Prairie Games' Minions of Mirth". It'll be interesting to see how the game does at the Independent Games Festival. I hope the judges have some experience with MMORPG titles and also give the single player game a thorough going over... we'll see :)

I recently traveled to Eugene, Oregon for the GarageGames "Community Weekend". It was awesome to meet the employees, interns, associates, and community members behind the single greatest resource for independent game developers on the planet. I've never been in such close proximity to so much talent, creativity, energy, and perhaps most importantly goodwill. There's a very real sense of "your success is my success" and this kind of spirit can move mountains. Have no doubt, the company and the community want you to succeed. Period.

It's been five years since I registered on GarageGames. In that time, I have seen an amazing amount of progress. It's all to easy to lose sight of it all in the daily churn of forum discussions. When I bought my Torque license, there was very little documentation, few community resources, and I had to publish any game I made exclusively through GarageGames. I paid $100 five years ago and now have Torque 1.42 and Lighting Kit under a great license, loads of community resources, and excellent documentation. We have or will soon have Torque Game Builder, Torque Network Library, Torque Advanced, TGE 1.5, Constructor, and Torque X!!! This is a staggering amount of extremely versatile technology which has actually shipped games. I was able to meet many of the core guys behind the technology at the Community Weekend. This experience in itself was worth the trip. I have a great deal of confidence in this team and no reservations about continuing my own investment in GarageGames technology.

GarageGames is not solely about awesome game technology. They are working hard on original game development, marketing, and the distribution side of things. I have watched GarageGames develop and ship Marble Blast, get it bundled with iMacs, and make history with Marble Blast Ultra on the XBox 360. This is an amazing success story and truly illustrates that GG is a cohesive and experienced team of game and business developers. It was really great to speak with people who "just get it" and share so much personal vision. It's difficult to make something like "World Domination Through Collaboration" ring true on a website. In person, there's no difficulty at all. I have drunk the GarageGames kool-aid and it tastes great!

I was really honored by the reception of our work at Prairie Games. The appreciation of your work by peers is extremely meaningful and it was great to see a number of excellent indie games being shown.

I'm very glad that I finally was able to meet the founders of GarageGames who are very much heroes to myself and many others... I've never meet or even spoken with these guys or any other GG employee on the phone. The "face time" was awesome and I felt a great deal of connection at a core level. I've also wanted to demo Minions of Mirth to Jeff Tunnell for a long time and can now check that off my list :)

I was also able to meet Magnus Blikstad from Sweden who modeled, rigged, animated, and textured the inhabitants of Mirth in record time... Here's a pic of Magnus (on the right) and myself in front of GG World HQ as photographed by Joshua Dallman:


Thanks to everyone at GarageGames for the great weekend and making us all feel so welcome!!!

-Josh Ritter
President
Prairie Games, Inc