Really bothered by the Starter Kits

#1 What would you like to see from the documentation? How to make X type of game?

There has actually been a long thread regarding what the community wants to see from the docs and most people said anything but "How to make X type of game". When you learn how to use a game engine, you try to find out as much as possible about the functions and features, boundaries and limitations before you create your own product. That is what people were asking for. Small, featured tutorials aimed at specific areas so that they learn what the engine can do.

GG should not, and will not provide methods of creating X type of game, because this is where you can make some money. I came to the TGB community mid-last year. One of the first posts I saw on the forum was about the lack of a platform kit. What did I do? I fiddled around, got a simple platform game working and expanded upon it.

Making the TGB Platformer Kit was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had, period. I saw an opportunity to learn a great deal about the engine and hopefully make some money in the process. What is preventing you from doing the same? Why aren't you able to create X type of game and release it as a kit?

Documentation will never replace Starter Kits, and Starter Kits will never replace documenation. They have two completely different roles.

I'm not talking about just on the forums, but as a general rule for life. The people who yell the loudest are generally the ones who do the least. If you see a gap, an opening, an opportunity to make your life and possibly others better, take it. But I can promise you that if you're one of the loud ones, you'll miss it.

#2 Phillip,
The message that I get from you is that you would rather see Garage Games sell a bunch of licenses to people who try to learn this system and give up in frustration because of poor documentation?
Is that correct?

#3 To be honest the documentation is THAT poor, at least I've got a decent grasp of it all without any prior programming experiance. Just have to stick with it. Saying that GG have admitted that docs are a problem, for all of their engines, and I think somthing is being done about it.

Edit: Doh! First line is ment to read:
To be honest the documentation isn't THAT poor...

Left the original in there so following posts make sence. I should get some sleep!

#4 You got that from my post?

I asked you what you want to see from the documentation. I then explained the difference between documentation, starter kits and why GG shouldn't release them as a form of documentation.

I'll ask you again, what do you expect from the documentation?

#5 Tom: And they are trying to do something about it, but saying that they are "poor" and not telling them what you want to see from them is not constructive and they will never be updated in the direction that you want them.

If you have a problem, state it. If you have said it before, link to it. You can't make an argument from nothing, you need to have a basis on which to build your arguement.

#6 Use the 1.1.3 documentation (download tgb 1.1.3, install it, use its docs).
It's way better than the new one right now.

As for everything else, TGB is an engine, not a Game Maker like, you'll still have to make yourself all of your game rules.

#7 @Stephen - Suggesting that we're trying to screw people over isn't necessarily the best way to start a conversation, but I'll be open about my thoughts on the subject: In-depth, genre-specific stuff doesn't make much sense to include in our base documentation, because it would only be helpful to a small fraction of our customers. When you write documentation (as with any other design activity) you need to prioritize goals. Personally, I prioritize "fun and engaging documentation" over "faithfulness to a specific genre". Implementing specific games in recognized genres always include boring, frustrating, or "unfun" parts. It's just the nature of the beast -- there's always some part of the process of gamedev that sucks. If your love for the genre can get you over that hump, then great. But there are a lot of genres out there, what are the odds that any given author will pick your favorite? Would our customers want to go through the rough parts built in to the docs to serve a genre they don't care about? Personally, I don't think so. So for our general products, I don't think there will be much genre focus.

Now, if you change the equation, such as by creating a separate, pay-for product like Phillip has, then it potentially makes sense. You can assume that the people buying that product or reading those docs have a vested interest in the genre (since they cared enough to pay for it), and you can really focus on the things that are important to the genre, even if they might be boring, repetitive, etc., in the broader context. And you can use the revenue brought in by the kit to justify the developer time required to produce it.

We are a business, and we do need to think about our time and energy in a return-on-investment way. I don't think that makes us evil, and it certainly doesn't make Phillip evil for seeing a need in the market and wanting to fill it.

#8 Phillip,
I'll give you an example of what I wanted to see in the documentation. New information on how to use Tile Maps. The information in the documentation is pretty outdated by now. They don't really go into how to use a tile map properly.
I pretty much stand by my original statement. The Starter Kits are getting more attention from Garage Games than the documentation that they provide because they would rather make Cash off people trying to use their product than properly support the products that they put out in the first place.

#9 @Dan
My problem is that we don't get enough information from you as to where the new documentation currently stands. I'm feel like I am getting burned by buying these products and not being able to get any use out of them. I own, TGE License, Both of Ken's Books, TGB License, Torrison. I've read that documentation up and down like no tomorrow. I've gone over all the material. Where has that gotten me to making any real progress? It feels like I am behind. I see the Starter Kit come out and it's like, why do I need to buy the starter kit so I can properly use the program I paid money for that I should be able to get some real use out of it right now.
No it doesn't make you or him evil but it really makes me question as to where this is really all going.
And posts like Ben make me really wonder what happened to the documentation that we are at 1.7.2 and an older version of TGB has better documentation?

#10 Personally, I've found TGB to be insanely easy, compared to other engines...

#11 @Stephen - I can understand that you want more insight into things, but you also need to look at it from our perspective. We've been burned in the past by telling people that things were coming, only for people to get disappointed when circumstances prevented those things from getting finished.

I also sympathize with your frustrations with our documentation. I don't like it when people are frustrated with our docs, and (long term) I want people to have an easier time learning how to use our products, but Rome wasn't built in a day, and we also need to balance our desire to improve the docs with a lot of other things that we want to do (such as getting our latest and greatest tech out to people, and making sure we've got enough revenue coming in to justify the time and effort that we put into our product lines, etc.). If we could snap our fingers and fix these problems, they would be fixed, but these are not easy problems to fix.

As to whether 1.1.3 has better docs than 1.7.2, Benjamin is entitled to his opinion. There were changes made to the way we did documentation in 1.5 that some people may not like, and there may be some areas that were previously documented better, but there are also areas where 1.7.2 is a big improvement. I'll also say that blanket comments like "1.1.3 is better" are the kind of criticisms that don't help make things better.

#12 Stephen,

You don't need a starter kit to get proper use out of TGB. The "starter" in starter kit does not imply for beginners but rather a way to get a leg up on starting a project by getting pre-made art and/or code for a specific genre. This way programmers have some nice art to prototype their games with and artists have ready made behaviors to help them along in scripting game logic.

While I don't think anyone would say that the TGB documentation is perfect and doesn't need improvements, there's enough information in there to help people get started. What part of the documentation is holding you back from making simple games and slowly over time adding more and more complexity as you get familiar with Torquescript and the editor?

#13 Doh! My original post has been edited to include what I intended to write...missing out 2 letters completly reversed my opinion!
As my previous post was ment to say, I don't think the docs are that bad, everything you would want is around, the reference page on TDN is the best source for info:
tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TGB/Reference

#14 To be frank,

if you have purchased the "TGE License, Both of Ken's Books, TGB License, Torrison" and have gone through them to no end like you say..... give up now, there is no hope. You possibly prefer the idea of making a game than actually learning what it takes to make one.

If you SIMPLY go through the tutorials (fish, whack-a-mole, etc) that ship with TGB..... I am having a hard time understanding how you couldn't possibly be able to jump right in and make your own game.

I was getting great results within a few days after going through the tutorials. You must TRULY understand the given tutorials if you want to grasp the basics. If you get stuck on a specific command or syntax, that's what the forums are for.

If you're looking for insta-game then you should just drop $60 on the latest and hotest title and save yourself the trouble of creating it yourself.

#15 @Gellyware - Yeah, I'd like to see you in the same position after spending $500 on this and not get anywhere.

#16 I wanted to comment quickly on one thing that hasn't been brought up:

Quote:
The Starter Kits are getting more attention from Garage Games than the documentation that they provide because they would rather make Cash off people trying to use their product than properly support the products that they put out in the first place.

Phillip doesn't work for GarageGames--he's a third party that decided to spend his own personal time making a new starter kit. Our (single person) third party contract manager, Derek Bronson, supported Phillip as required for the third party relationship, but Derek doesn't write tutorials--so even if he didn't give any assistance whatsoever to Phillip (and other third parties, such as Jeff Faust and his AFX kit), he still wouldn't be writing tutorials.

GarageGames hasn't made a starter kit for sale since one person made the Platformer Starter Kit for TorqueX just under a year ago (edited for accuracy), and before that, the only starter kit we ever sold was the RTS Starter Kit. We of course may either continue to assist other third parties in making starter kits, or even make our own if it makes sense for our market and ourselves, but we currently don't have developers spending time making starter kits.

You are basically blaming us for spending time on things that we aren't spending time on, and implying that we shouldn't make content and code developed by non-GG employees available in a convenient and logical place--our web store.

@Stephen:

If you step back a moment from your personal frustration, does it really make sense to you that we shouldn't allow folks like Phillip and Jeff to provide code, assets, and add-ons to the engine so that others can choose to benefit?

#17 Well when I look at the documentation and compare it to what seems like a more concentrated effort to promote Starter Packs than provide improved documentation that doesn't look like a complete mess, that is where I am getting this from. If the documentation wasn't a problem, I wouldn't be having this problem with the starter kit. There was talk back in September about making changes and improvements to the documentation and while there was some chatter up till December, no one was saying when we would see such improvements or even put in our suggestions to get that organized. Oh and while I was looking at 1.13 last night I did notice that it had one tutorial that was removed, the shooter tutorial. It doesn't make sense why that one was removed.

#18 I'm new to TGB/TGE/TGEA (as of about 2 weeks ago), but not new to coding. I personally found that there is enough documentation out there, and it's more than adequate (although some of it, including tutorials, are out dated and need to be revised or removed). On saying that, the most frustrating part for me has been digging out the information - which has been made more frustrating due to the really bad search feature. If GG could use a decent message board system, and do away with the google search, it would probably make life a lot easier on people - just my 2 cents based on my last two weeks experience.

Stick with it, there is a great active community here, and like anything else you have to do some leg work yourself.

After doing the "fish", "behavior", and "asteroids" tutorials I was able to make my own "3 in a row" bejeweled style rip off; however, I've been programming C/C++ for over 15 years so picking up the TorqueScript was very easy for me - your milage may vary. Best advice I can give is to go through the fish tutorial (actually all of the ones I mentioned above) and play around with the code until you understand what it does - even if that means playing with function parameters to see what your changes do in comparrison to the original code.

#19 I would like to say that the documentation has come a LONG way then where it was a few years back. Kudos to them for that!

#20 Alright I'll give you an another example I have run into with the documentation.
mySceneGraph.setDebugOn(0);
I messed around with that command for a good 2 hours and could not get it to work.
Explain to me how it is suppose to work within the scene.