Where's the beef

#41 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.

#42

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.

#43 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.

#44 @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.

#45 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

#46 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?

#47 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

#48 See my .plan in response to this plus a BONUS RANT here. :)

#49 "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?

#50 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.

#51 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.

#52 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.

#53 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 :)

#54

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

#55 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

#56 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

#57 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. ;)

#58 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:)

#59 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.

#60 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!