GarageGames Acquires BraveTree Productions
GarageGames Acquires BraveTree Productions
| Submitted: | Benjamin Bradley |
|---|---|
| Posted: | Jun 13, 2005 |
| Synopsis: | GarageGames |
| Keywords: | games garagegames development |
Article
GarageGames today announced the purchase of BraveTree Productions. This acquisition allows GarageGames to leverage BraveTree's 30 years of game industry experience as it continues to expand its focus and create fun original games for next-gen consoles and computers. "We've always been devoted to making games," said Mark Frohnmayer, newly promoted President of GarageGames. "With expanded opportunities like Xbox 360, it was natural for us to include the BraveTree team. This allows us to work together to support our mutual passion for making fun games benefiting both of us with increased creative collaboration as well as putting more energy and investment directly into games." Members of the former BraveTree team have already become key additions to GarageGames. "Getting to focus just on creating games without the distractions of running an indie studio fulfills our original purpose in founding BraveTree," said Joe Maruschak, former Creative Director of BraveTree Productions and current GarageGames' Creative Director. "Its exciting to be able to contribute to the success of GarageGames' games and technology." BraveTree Productions, the studio behind the indie hit ThinkTanks, has been a vital member of the GarageGames community and has been a long-time partner with GarageGames. Now, with the purchase of BraveTree Productions, GarageGames adds talented and experienced artists and game developers to its growing garage. "I've enjoyed watching the guys over at BraveTree mature as game developers," said Jeff Tunnell, GarageGames' founder. "I used to work with some of the BraveTree team back at Dynamix and now seeing them succeed as an independent studio is great. I'm looking forward to working along side them in the future." |
Submit your own resources!| Andy Schatz (Jun 11, 2005 at 06:42 GMT) |
Edited on Jun 11, 2005 07:13 GMT
| Matthew Langley (Jun 11, 2005 at 07:19 GMT) |
| Danny Ngan (Jun 11, 2005 at 07:20 GMT) |
| Karl Nyborg (Jun 11, 2005 at 14:10 GMT) Resource Rating: 4 |
:?
| Keith Killilea (Jun 11, 2005 at 14:23 GMT) |
| Adam deGrandis (Jun 11, 2005 at 14:37 GMT) |
| Simon Love (Jun 11, 2005 at 16:04 GMT) |
Are there any implications for us GG devs? For instance, will the X360 become a viable platform for TSE, as Mac, Pc and Linux are right now? Are GG employees still going to put as much passion and work into the indie game dev scene(TGE, T2D)? I'm simply worried that Garagegames might be shifting its focus. Please put my fears to rest :)
| Keith Killilea (Jun 13, 2005 at 22:47 GMT) |
| Treb Connell(formerlyMasterTreb) (Jun 13, 2005 at 23:00 GMT) |
| Joshua Dallman (Jun 14, 2005 at 01:47 GMT) |
maybe now those bravetree guys can fan out in the gg offices instead of all being crammed in that one room! :P
| Pat Wilson (Jun 14, 2005 at 02:55 GMT) |
The number of programmers who are working, primarly, on technology has been increased by one.
(The number of people we run into the room to and frantically say "I need art!!!!" has been increased by two.)
Don't worry about the future of technology at GarageGames. It's still what we've done to get the company this far, and what we'll continue to do until the inevetable hostile takeover by EA after which we retire to Baja California and...wait did I say that out loud? j/k
As for everything regarding the Xbox 360...we are keeping our cards face-down for now.
| Ben Garney (Jun 14, 2005 at 03:45 GMT) |
We're also not working on kickass new versions of all of our technologies, nor are we going to continue to produce and release cool indie games. We won't be trying to increase the opportunities available to indies at every turn, and we have no plans at all to open the way for them to get everywhere people play computer games...
| Brian Russey (Jun 14, 2005 at 05:47 GMT) |
I would really like to see or at least hear about more development being put into these core areas. I know and understand you're all working on improving the art pipeline and adding in more tools to attract new customers. I realise that this may help further the core engine in the long term forecast. I would not want GG to be sidetracked or drastically change it's current business model.
Art and tools may help the engine set together as a whole. However without a good core foundation, all the tools in the world don't really mean much. It just seems to me (From what I see on the website) that more work is currently being focused on the Art Pipeline rather then engine updates/upgrades. However, I very well could be wrong about this. Faster TSE gets completed the better. TGE could also benefit from updates, like the recent TNL update, etc.
I'm fairly new and all but seeing a list of what is being planned for release TGE 1.4 would be nice. Or maybe it's out there somewhere and I just haven't found it yet.
Thanks.
| Joe Maruschak (Jun 14, 2005 at 06:10 GMT) |
GarageGames now has a bunch of new developers that can hit the ground running. We know the engine, the toolchain, and the pipeline, and we are using to create games and will continue to create games using the tech.
Now, as part of GarageGames, the end users will see the benefit as technology we create for games will make it back into the engine. As BraveTree, we just did not have the time, and it would be a money losing proposition for us.. this is no longer the case.
As part of GarageGames, we will giving the tools and tech a good 'shakedown' by using them on the game projects we are working on. This will not be ivory tower idealism.. this will be real world work on projects that will ship, and the tools will be in ship shape as we are committed to using them.
As Pat stated above, this increase the manpower and braintrust, and it will keep the GG tech crew from being spread thin, and will allow us to collectively push forward, finish up, and fully implement MANY things that have either been 'in the works' or in idea stage for a long time.
On the 'more room' thing... we were hoping for that as well, but it now appears that they will be moving 4 interns into our office, and the server room is apparently going to move into our office as well to make way for our new presidents inversion boot apparatus.
| Nick Zafiris (Jun 14, 2005 at 08:22 GMT) |
Best wishes in your new relationship guys.
Quote:
Now, as part of GarageGames, the end users will see the benefit as technology we create for games will make it back into the engine.
I like that...
Nick
| Matt Fairfax (Jun 14, 2005 at 10:54 GMT) |
| Canon (Jun 14, 2005 at 12:19 GMT) |
:) interesting
| Brett Fattori (Jun 14, 2005 at 12:55 GMT) |
- Brett
Edited on Jun 14, 2005 12:55 GMT
| Chip Lambert (Jun 14, 2005 at 13:28 GMT) |
I knew one day GG would break the bonds of indiehood and began buying up every little studio... isn't this how EA started....
:) Congrats guys. I'm sure it'll benefit everyone, not just BraveTree and GG but the community as a whole.
| Gabor Forrai (Jun 14, 2005 at 13:30 GMT) |
| Steve L (Jun 14, 2005 at 13:44 GMT) |
| David Montgomery-Blake (Jun 14, 2005 at 14:06 GMT) |
| Clark Fagot (Jun 14, 2005 at 18:00 GMT) |
Actually, BraveTree acquired GarageGames, except we kept their name and used almost all our stock to do it. :)
But seriously, I'm glad the press release is out now...we've been excited about this move for a while. It's been a definite positive for our productivity. I no longer have to talk to accountants, lawyers, and insurance agents (although they are all perfectly nice people, just in case any of them are reading this :). Joe no longer has to get on the phone to do biz dev. In fact, I work from home several days a week now (I sit on my couch at 10:30am as I type), simply because I can and I like the change of environment.
But the benefits go well beyond that. To answer some of the questions that Brian (rightly) raises, allow me to focus on how this change affects the work I do.
Any little project I decide to pick up and work on for a week can now be a productive task rather than blue sky work where the payout is uncertain. E.g., at the beginning of the year I spent some evenings allowing Torque to do scalable shells (which means that the screen pretends it's, say, 800x600 even when it's bigger or smaller). Anyone who has worked on creating a multi-res shell knows what a nice feature this is (previously only available in the Unreal engine). It's the type of project that doesn't really work as a resource because there are so many teeny (but important) changes to make. But it can easily be added to a future version of Torque and suddenly everyone has access to it just like that. Before, although I could contribute the code back to Torque (and in the past I had done that with a number of enhancements and bug fixes) it didn't really behoove me to make a practice of doing new things and then contributing them to Torque simply because we needed to make sure our time was spent on tasks that brought in money in a timely fasion -- all the other indies out there know where I'm coming from on this one I'm sure.
Another example is the work I'm doing on network physics and collisions for dRacer. I've spent a good amount of time studying why when vehicles get near each other you get what JoshW calls the Torque jitter. The reason comes down to all the objects on the clients and the server having their own idea of "what time is it?". The result of all this study has been a system which I think will help propel Torque even further ahead of the competition when it comes to networking. So far I only have proof of concept working, but it's looking like this will solve a big problem with mutliplayer racing games and other games which want to have a lot of networked contact between the game objects. As BraveTree we would have a hard time monetizing this work. It would go into our games, but clearly it's value goes well beyond usage in our own games. We could have simply contributed it back to GarageGames, but as an indie you don't want to be giving away cutting edge work you do just because you don't know how to fully realize it's value. As GarageGames, the value of this project can be easily realized by simply adding the code to HEAD.
Then there's the component system, which I can now keep a more watchful eye on to make sure it conforms to my vision of what it can be. We had a deal in place before, but a lot of the work of getting it into Torque was going to fall on the GG staff, so it wasn't clear that it would end up being exactly what I think it can be. The merger allows me to take a more active role in flushing out how it will work.
Of course, the one thing the merger doesn't do is give everyone more time. So, unfortunately, not all these technology benefits are going to be realized as quickly as we'd all like. But they will happen.
Another one of Brian's concerns (I'm refering to Brian Russey in the comment above) was that he wants tech not games, so the announcement that BT is joining GG to make more games leaves him uncertain. I strongly believe that you want us making games. That's because blue sky research is really not, in my experience, very useful. Research projects need grounding or else they get nowhere. New ideas come from new problems, and new problems come from new games. If you have someone sitting back in a chair thinking about what the issues are going to be for you guys while you make your games, you are going to get a bunch of elegant solutions to problems you don't experience, and hand wavey gestures when you bring up more mundane problems which these arm chair engineers didn't bother to think of.
| Erik Madison (Jun 14, 2005 at 20:37 GMT) |
| Nicolas Quijano (Jun 15, 2005 at 17:14 GMT) |
Mighty Cheers, and a resounding Keep On Torquin' !!! 8p
| Joseph Villard (Jun 15, 2005 at 17:38 GMT) |
:( But some of us like talking to Joe on the phone ... Good move for everybody IMHO. Good luck guys!
| Josh Williams (Jun 18, 2005 at 08:44 GMT) |
Speaking personally, it was always kind of weird to me that BT and GG weren't together... same goals, same office, everyone gets along great... this was a natural, and it's an honor to be working even more closely with Joe, Clark, Mark, John, and Matt now.
Edited on Jun 18, 2005 08:46 GMT
| Dawson Goodell (Jun 19, 2005 at 04:25 GMT) |
jk, of course.
Edited on Jun 19, 2005 04:35 GMT
| Jonathan Rose (Jul 06, 2005 at 23:38 GMT) |
| Jacob Hutchinson (Feb 02, 2006 at 03:14 GMT) |
| Michael Holstein (Nov 26, 2007 at 01:24 GMT) |
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