First Time User

#1 Read the documentation that came with TGEA ... or go here: www.garagegames.com/documentation and read the getting started section.

Takes you everything ... there are links to coding best practices.

Other then that, take one of the test missions and start adding your own players and customising the mission to suit your needs.

That's how I did it.

#2 If you're planning anything big, you can check this one out. It's geared specifically towards MMOs, but works for most projects, and has scores of links in the comments if you are planning an online game.

#3 Welcome, Kartik,

You'll find that there's info just about everything in blogs, resources, forums. If I were you, I'd start with something simple, such as taking the FPS Genre Kit example in TGEA, and playing around with objects, relighting the mission, increasing Kork's ammo from the console, etc..

I'd say start off with scripting stuff to see what you can and what you can't do from script. Check out the sources for the example missions to see how stuff's done.

Create some simple asset in your favorite 3D editor, and bring it into the engine. It's good to get hold of the pipeline early, because in TGEA, it can get tricky - depending on what application you need to import your objects from.

If you begin to create your own game - whenever you feel a bit more comfortable (or even right now!) - my advice is that you should really save some time first to write down what you want to do on a piece of paper. Plan ahead. When you did that, create screen mockups for your GUI. What will each button do? What do your enemies act like?

When you're ready to start, take a bug reporting software, such as Trac or Bugzilla, or whatever you're familiar with, and add a few simple goals, such as Create main menu gui or Make player jump two times as high. This won't just save you time, you will be able to backtrack your problems and their solutions if you take notes in the ticket comments.

A very important thing: use comments around your code when you change the engine. You WILL move your source to newer versions, or need to find what you have modified compared to a vanilla engine version. Make that clear by encapsulating your changes in blocks such as:

... original code ...

// My change >>>
... changed code ...
// <<< My change

... original code ...

Finally, probably the most important thing is that you regularly back up your data. I've seen it here multiple times that people lose months or even years of work due to a hard drive failure. If you can afford it, create a version control repository online, and commit your work each day. I use SVN, but there are many apt tools for this. You could also have your repository on another hard drive if you can't have it online.

Hope you do a great take off with Torque! :)

#4 Also, there are many professional game developers and designers here whom you can learn a lot from!

Kevin Ryan did an awesome blog some time ago about creating a simple iPhone game.

#5 Hello Everybody,

Thank you very much for your posts. It was very helpful and I'm sure will point me in the right direction.

Dear Konrad, your post was really very helpful. Thanks again..!!