Where's the beef

#61 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!!!!!!!!
:)

#62 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.

#63 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.

#64 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!

#65 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

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


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

#67

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.

#68 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.

..

#69 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.

#70 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.

#71 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.

#72 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 GG content, only to get something that's setup for the developer's own private build of TGE, and has to be manually disassembled to get the packaged demo to work. More time wasted trying to get even the simplest thing to work, and one very peeved customer.

There, those are 6 points that GG can look at to help. Some more extreme ideas, based purely on personal opinion follow.

1. Ditch TorqueScript and move to a standard scripting language that people might know. Expecting people to learn a language that only has application within your engine, and is not compatible with *anything* is an enormous time sink, and a huge barrier to entry, especially as regards the art pipeline.

2. Ditch the DIF format for interiors. TGE's interior implementation sucks, and I constantly see GG employees advising "use a DTS with a teleport to a DIF that's miles off your map". Find a format that's well supported, or make one up. Allow for things like moving doors, platforms, and for *connected interiors*. Fix the problem whereby an interior can't intersect terrain. Solve these issues, and make content producers very, very happy.

"What, oh what are GG doing right?", I hear you cry.

1. Listening. You'd be surprised how often doing this is overlooked, and what an enormous difference it makes.

2. TSE. Well, actually, fixing the terrain implementation. Shaders are nice, but I won't be thinking about that for a while. Yeah, now just make it so that I don't have to cut a square hole in my terrain to put a building on a slope.

3. Encouraging effort and rewarding success. Every time I look at the list of games published and sold on the GG site, that's just one more little bit of encouragement, and with a 3-4 year development cycle, I need every bit I can get.


I don't know if I'm going to stick wth TGE, I feel pretty encumbered by the time I've invested in it and the comparative lack of progress I feel that I've made. I literally had more success working with [a different system] for the last 3 days that I had in my first month of TGE. Notably the other system I'm experimenting with has only none of the issues that make working with TGE a struggle for me.

I'm glad that I'm still very early in the process of developing my game, that I have a solid design and some fantastic concept art together, a foundation that I know will work irrespective of my choice of engine. Witha little luck, TGE will mature sufficiently for me to use it in the next few months. I sure hope so.

EDIT: Typos. *shudder*

#73 How much life is really left into TGE anyway?
It would take long time and big effort from GG to fix/change TGE into a solid and friendly to use engine which by the time is all fixed up/tooled up/pipelined up :) it will still 'potentially' output an 'outated look' at least due to the lack of shaders, pixel, vertex, normal mapping etc...

I will jump to TSE (EA already bought) as soon as I can, only using TGE to try things out because by the time my game will have progressed to a decent state surely TSE should be very usable by then.

Is there a good point into keep pushing/working on TGE?
Other low or similar priced engines or slightly more expensive engines already make use of DX 9 full power... so really how long will people keep using TGE for?
What if we only had TSE and T2D to worry about/work with/improve to excellence?

Just a morning thought...

#74 I agree with the above, personally I think TGE is just a little too dated nowadays, and there's little point bringing it upto date when that is already being done with TSE. Essentially I think the best thing GG can do is ramp up development of TSE and get it out the door ASAP - it's visually impressive and that alone will attract more artists and such to the scene and they're what's sorely lacking for most projects.

As I see it, the sooner TSE is ready, the sooner a lot of us can start serious work on our projects.

#75 I agree with Randy "Vashner" Anthony comment.

Also, I just want to point out (again) the problem with documentation and tutorials. Our biggest challenge is "work flow continuity". Because our main living activity many times is unrelated with Torque directly, we can only focus our attention to it during short periods of time (few hours a day for a few days a month....), that means that we can only focus on one problem at a time. When we face a problem with the engine code and we can`t find proper documentation soon enough, by the time we solve the issue, we forgot what was the purpose of what we were trying to fix, and worse..... time is up and it is necessary to pay attention to all the other things put aside while we were working with Torque (Family, friends, groceries, house fixes,.....).

Next time we have a chance to use the engine, we feel frustrated of our lack of advance... then we try to attack another front of the project, and again, we find another documentation issue (in a small detail usually).... and the story repeats again..... Six months later, we find that our project is a bunch of unrelated patches (half finished most of them).... then we stop to think.

Next year, we look at the community again, and we find that the engine has evolved a lot, but the documentation and tutorials are not there. Worse, migrating the code of our project or try to update the code to the new milestone is so cumbersome, that you decide to give it a try to a "new killer idea"... And here we go again.

I love that GG is working hard in the product documentation, I am sure that is going to greatly maximize our time and focus, so we can see a fully finished prototype, that will encourage us to dig deeper in the engine and refine it until we have a finished product.

I hope my comments help, and by no means I would like to sound ungrateful or demanding

#76 I believe there are a couple of things that hamper the development of new games in TGE, TSE and T2D. But overall I think that there is one issue that, if fixed, could turn the situation around quickly. I

#77 After reading ALL the griping about what is 'deficient'...these words from Jeff T keep coming back:

"It is amazing to me the amount of entitlement people are expecting from a $100 software product."

No kidding. In this very posting people are listing their "12 point plan" that GG would have to implement to be able to ship more games.

This baffles me.

I have been working on a game for 2+ years now in my spare time (I'm indie and have not quit the day job...).
It has taken me SO long to get to this point, and yet...I blame only myself and my lack of process and my
lack of focus on what is important. I can't really even picture what could have been different in Torque to
have made that process take less time.

The fault lies with me...not with the tools. As an experienced developer this is super clear to me. Why is this
taking so long to make a game? My own lack of experience as a game developer. Listing any other reason would just be making excuses.

#78 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.

This kinda bugs me a little, because it shows that maybe GG aren't listening to the right kinda feedback. I work on a number of large, successful open source projects. In the last five years, I've never heard anyone offer the excuse "what do you expect from something that's free?"

The question of what the community expects from GG after acquiring a TGE license is pretty fundamental to the adoption rate of TGE, and more importantly to the throughput of teams using it.

No, I don't think anyone could justify expecting GG to teach them how to program, but then I would hope that GG ignores such requests and lets the community handle that kind of signal:noise issue itself.

What I do expect, and what I think most developers who are serious about using TGE expect, is information on how to use the product. I don't want you to teach anyone how to program, but I do want you to teach them how to use your engine.

If you want to get into the business of teaching people how to be an indy developer, that's cool, but it might be a plan to spin off a separate division of GG that focusses on the business development side of things, so that the core team isn't distracted from the business of making and supporting Torque.

Every time I read the "what do you expect for $100" argument, I think that the person propounding it is a real sticking point for further adoption of TGE. As far as I'm concerned, I bought a game engine, and whether it's free or costs $100k, I do expect to be provided with all the information I need to use it. Yes, TGE is worth more than $100. If thinking that the community undervalues your work is preventing further progress, there's a quick solution: you set the price, you can change it.

#79 With regards to the original question:
-The end of the project (bug fixing, polish) is often the slowest, least fun and least rewarding portion
-Torque does not provide payment or security options, which may be daunting to average Joes
-Quite often people only discover that their game isn't fun until halfway through, at which point they opt to start over
-3D games require a lot of resources

I suspect that Torque 2D will see a lot more small games get finished simply because a single person can do all the work.

#80 Heh, I`m not a nice man, so I`ll say it straight- some of the stuff in here is ridiculous and sometimes simply pathetic search for excuses. "Ten reasons why I still havent made game with Torque". Meh. The fact is - there are games out there, made with Torque, by third parties. Period. *They* worked around the problems, *they* made stuff happen. Thats how real life works. I suspect *they* would have made a game with any other game engine as well, documentation or no documentation, Terribly Cripplingly Monstruous Art Pipeline That Didnt Allow Me To Make My Game But Ate My Neighbours Instead or not.

If GG has to become a dev matchmaking service, simply because we dont know how to find like minded individuals, there`s rather significant possibility that stuff is wrong with us, not GG.

Regarding Pat`s initial question: "where`s the beef" - I think reason is simply the way most indies tick - in a scene where relationships are not based on pay but enthusiasm for a specific idea, relationship lasts only so long as lasts the enthusiasm. Since making a 3D game takes longer, most of the relationships deteriorate before any significant progress milestone is reached and additional enthusiasm influx is received.
T2D allows seeing progress soon and level of creative adrenaline doesnt dry up as easily. I`d say that now that T2D is out, its possible we`ll see much more efficient teams appear, because they`ll have had *completed* one thing together as team, become hooked and more organised.