How do you make a game? It's a daunting thing to think about. Many games today take teams of dozens (or even hundreds) of people, multi-million dollar budgets, and several years to complete. How can you keep up?

You're using a powerful engine to help realize your game development goals, so that's a good first step. But Torque, like any commercially viable game engine, is big. Really big. That means it can be difficult to learn all there is to know about it, and even where to start learning.

That's why we've created this book. We know it can be hard to figure out how to go from staring at a huge base of engine source-code to creating a real game. So, what's the first step? How do you get your project going?

We'll address such questions in this chapter. In the rest of this book, we'll get into the nitty-gritty details on how to use the Torque Game Engine and it's supporting tools. But first, we need to take a look at the general process of game development as Indies.

In this chapter, we offer a high-level outline of how to create a profitable game with Torque. We'll discuss the process of game creation, but we don't just speak in high-level generalities. Each step in the outline below is backed up with "In the real world" sections, which talk about the development of Marble Blast. Marble Blast is a successful Indie game made with Torque, and many lessons can be gleaned from its development. Marble Blast also demonstrates that you don't have to build a first-person shooter to quickly produce a successful game with Torque.

Figure 2.1. Marble Blast

We'll study Marble Blast's development story to illustrate how the advice in this chapter works in the real world.

Of course, not all Torque licensees are out to create a profitable business making games. Some people have slick code ideas, and pick up Torque for the sole purpose of implementing those ideas using a stable, recognized engine base to build from. Some licensees are interested in getting hired by large game development companies, and license a well-known engine like Torque in order to show off what they can do with code or art, building up their portfolio and resume. Other licensees simply want to play around with a powerful engine. Others do want to make games, but don't necessarily care about making them profitable-- they just want to try to bring their dream games to life.

All of these are excellent reasons to license the engine. No matter your personal motivation for buying Torque, the points discussed in this chapter can be learned from and adapted to any game development project. We're really talking about the process of game development here, especially as it applies Indies. The reason we focus on producing profitable Indie games in this chapter is because making profitable games with small teams is harder than most other projects undertaken with the engine.

This chapter drills down into enough detail about working with Torque that you'll begin to get an idea of how to use the engine in real projects. So, let's take a look.

For teams concerned about making profitable games, the first step is often the most important: