Who Should Use Torque X?

What does Torque X and XNA Game Studio Express do for you? Why should you use it?

If you're an aspiring game developer, and enjoy creating your own games, imagine how cool it would be to be able to run them on the Xbox 360;  XNA Game Studio Express will allow you to do just that. Coupled with Torque X, you'll be able to quickly create games, and invite your friends over to play them on your own Xbox 360!

If you're an independent developer, you are undoubtedly serious about creating games on your own and running a profitable business through their sale. It's incredibly hard work, and risky at that; putting your own time and money into games that are good enough to sell successfully, is doubly hard. With that in mind,  Indies have to minimize the time it takes them to complete a game, while maximizing it's level of distribution them. Taking that into account perhaps you can see why a multi-platform approach is a smart move quite a lot of Indie games.

Unfortunately, Indies are not able to take multi-platform approach because indies, with few exceptions, never have access to the biggest gaming platforms in the world-- videogame consoles. Console development kits are tightly controlled by the console manufacturers, and typically only major commercial game studios and publishers can get their hands on them. Even if an independent game company manages the hard task of applying for a console devkit and somehow gets approved, the kits themselves cost either thousands or tens of thousands of dollars depending on the platform.

Until now, Indies haven't had a gage the quality of their games on a console-- they couldn't test their gameplay ideas, whether their control schemes map well to console gamepads, or even if their artwork is well suited to Television. With XNA Game Studio Express those hurdles are eliminated; any independent developer can build their game, test it out on the Xbox 360, and then determine if the game will translate well to a console. If it does, then indies will be able to demonstrate the quality of their game either to publishers, or the console manufacturers themselves.

To be clear, XNA Game Studio Express does not allow Indies to distribute or sell their games on the Xbox 360. But it does indeed allow Indies to learn how to make games for consoles, and to test and refine their console game ideas. We believe this will help independent developers to take a large step forward in getting their games picked up for console distribution and getting the most out of the blood-sweat-tear equity they put into their projects. Use XNA Game Studio Express, and as if you've got an Xbox 360 devkit of your own.

Aside from opening up the Xbox 360, the XNA platform can save independent game developers a lot of time too. The XNA framework is built on top of Microsoft's .NET "managed" programming technology, which is designed to  allow programmers rapid implementation for their projects and eliminates a lot of hassles, such as tedious and finicky low-level memory management, out of traditional programming. This is especially true for independent game titles, which are generally tightly-scoped, small projects; developing on XNA with managed code will be much more rapid than using traditional, more difficult programming languages like C++.

As an independent game developer, you want to both minimize the time it takes you to create your games, and also provide yourself the most opportunity to get your game out to a wide audience. Using Torque X, you can build your game world quickly using all of the built-in features of the engine. And with  XNA Game Studio Express, you can get your game projects done more quickly, and therefore at lower cost.  For the first time, you can develop and polish games for both Windows and a next-generation console. That's a big deal.

As the games industry grows, game development courses are becoming more and more popular at schools and universities around the world, and nothing gets students more fired up about learning math and computer programming than the prospect of making their own games. Educators using XNA Game Studio Express and Torque X in their courses will be able to teach their students game development lessons and methodologies more efficiently, and their students will be able to see the fruits of their labor played on the Xbox 360, in the classroom, and at home.

In addition, the majority of jobs in the games industry are for console game projects. Educational institutions that are interested in teaching their students real-world game development techniques have long desired the ability to teach console game development specifics in their courses. With XNA Game Studio Express and Torque X, students can learn the ins and outs of developing games both for the PC, and for cutting-edge consoles with the Xbox 360, which will better prepare them for jobs in the industry.

Commercial game development studios will be able to use Torque X to rapidly prototype game ideas and easily test them on the Xbox 360 prior to production. And given the success we have had working with the XNA platform so far, we would even recommend it for full-blown production games. Open your mind a little... your studio might be composed of diehard C++ coders, but Microsoft has cooked up some awfully nice stuff with XNA. You may be surprised by its performance. You can ship real games on it, most likely in less time than you could using C++.