Torque Game Builder Hits 1.1.0!

After a long journey through development woe's and huge successes we have finally done it--Torque Game Builder 1.1.0 is here! Over here at GarageGames we've been working our butts off to get you guys the tools with which you can make your very own game; not to mention in a very short amount of time! This process has been a radical new approach to development for us, and it has proven to work quite well as we've been able to take the awesome T2D Early Adopter engine and build a set of tools around it that allow you to prototype and design levels, particle effects, tile maps, and pretty much anything you want in a 'What you see is what you get' style.
Download The Trial - Windows - Mac


The Path to Release:

Originally what has become TGB was intended to simply be a small add on tool for our amazing T2D engine, offering the simplest of capabilities for creating and manipulating scene objects for a scene. However, because of our awesome community's feedback and the amazing amount of work accomplished on this small tool by our team, it quickly became a whole different beast. In just under 7 months our small core team was able to bring you the most polished Torque tool to ever grace our community's eager hands. While TGB, much like any product, is not done--even 3DS Max at version 8 is not done--we have managed to get it to a point that you can create in it almost anything your over-active imagination can come up with!

Indulging Your Imagination:

If you've got a game you've just been dying to make, I invite you to download the TGB trial that can be found by clicking on the link above and make it happen! If you're anything like me, you may often say things like "Gee, I really wish there was a game that was like X, Y and Z" , but worry that you don't have the time to invest, or the resources to make it happen. With TGB you are now empowered to make it happen; We've had full games shipped within 3 months from concept to completion!

Rapid Prototyping:

TGB is not just your everyday 'gamemaker', quite the opposite really. TGB and its tools have been used by commercial studios such as Large Animal Games and others to create hundreds of levels for games, but it also offers, in conjunction with the T2D engine that powers it, the opportunity to get good at making games. If you're looking to create a game, to REALLY get a good game and make it happen, you will need to just dive in and start making small prototypes. Within our community people have taken it upon themselves to do sporadic 'Game in a Day' competitions using TGB in which members get together with a theme and see who can make the coolest game in under 24 hours. Some of the games created for these competitions end up not being as fun as they were intended to be, and are scrapped by their creators, but the knowledge is not lost. To truly get into making games you need to... well... do it! For more on succesfully creating games, and words of wisdom, check out Joe or Jeffs blogs; I find their words are often quite helpful to me.

Moving Forward:

With the release of TGB we realize that there is still much to do. During development we took the approach of having very open Alpha's and Beta's in our community, offering our latest tech up to anyone who owned a license and had a desire to play with the 'latest and greatest'. This was a wonderful thing for us, and we were able to implement many suggestions offered up by you all, and address a good majority of the bugs that you all reported. However, we do have some issues that time and manpower constraints left us unable to resolve before the initial release. We have addressed all known serious issues and will continue to improve upon the tool's usability and features over the coming months. We have a list of Known Issues posted in our forums that we were unable to address before release of 1.1.0.

Giving Proper Feedback:

Feedback is a great thing, but it can easily become essentially useless if not reported in a constructive, detailed manner. We love nothing more than to hear your ideas about what would make your experience better, and help improve your workflow. If you've got ideas, or run into any problems please feel free to let us know. We have setup a forum for problems with Tutorials or the Trial that you can find Here.

Bringing the Awesome:

I originally titled the above 'Bringing You the Awesome' but quickly changed it because not only do we want to help you get started by providing you with fresh new content as often as possible (in the form of tutorials and examples on TDN), but we also want to challenge all of you TGB Early Adopters to help us out. We will be doing our best to get you fun, exciting examples up on TDN regularly but we'd also like to see more of the cool stuff that you all are coming up with on TDN as well. So if you've got a cool little demo laying around that you did not finish, clean it up and post it on TDN. If we all share our breakthroughs, we can all learn more and make even cooler things! We'll be having alot of new users that will need a bit of help getting started, and we'd like to not only help them, but help us all by putting all we can at everyone's fingertips!


I'd like to say thank you to all the amazing people involved in this project, not only over at GG, but in our community. Without all of you this would not have been possible, and we look forward to continued development on this, not only on the Tech side, but also on the Documentation and community side in the following months and years. I truly hope you all find this as fun and exciting as we all do over here, and I personally can't wait to see all the cool stuff that you all come up with in the future! Enjoy TGB and let's make some games, after all, that's what we're here for, right? :)

All the Best,

-Justin