Slashdot Mirror

I agree that they could/should include prices, but it wasn't hard to find. From the article, clicking on the 'website' link for TubeTwist takes you to http://www.21-6.com/news.asp, and the 'News' there talks about how it shipped, and is available from GarageGames.com, with a link. That link takes you directly to http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id= 57, which shows it is $19.99

I was working for Garage Games at this conference.

The large robot game is Dark Horizon's: Lore and it will be released for linux in a few weeks. It is already available for windows and osx.

We also showed Think Tanks, Orbz, and Marble Blast. All of these are available for windows, mac and linux, from the Garage Games site.

We did NOT demo Doom. People were playing that because some of the machines didn't have good enough 3D acceleration (i.e. no nvidia cards) to run the other games.

It's not all doom and gloom - don't count us indies out so quickly.

There is a very interesting game I personally enjoy by Chronic Logic called Triptych that is quite innovative in my opinion. Kind of like bubble-popping Tetris, but with physics thrown in. They also have a popular bridge-building game called Pontifex II that you might find interesting. Definitely different than most indie games.

And of course there are the games at GarageGames, including our title Orbz - oh yeah, plugging away ;) . I challenge you to find a game quite like Orbz out there - it is definitely not a knock-off.

How do you find the torque engine in terms of flexibility, speed, and ease of use? I'd really like to try it out but I'm not sure if I want to spend a $100/developer licensing fee at this time ... (I have 3 developers, and not $300, haha). But if it's powerful, and will save some time on the development of our in-house engine that we're working on, I might drop a hundred bucks for myself.

Well... I fucking LOVE it. Seriously. The built in scripting language (TorqueScript) is pretty powerful for stuff that either (A) needs to be accessable to modders or (B) 'makes sense' in the scripting side (doing all of your collision detection from the scripting side would be bad. Handling the effects of a collision on the scripting side works well, and I use it extensively.)

Getting up and running with playable results is easy, depending on what gametype you are doing. If it's a first or third person style game, it's fairly simple - the SDK comes with a fully playable example that you can use as much code as you like from it. Just load it up, and start hackin' out what you don't need, and hackin' in what you do need.

It's pretty flexible - and what the engine doesn't have can be found a lot of times in the community forums under the Resources or Code Snippets area. If it's not there, it's usually pretty easy to hack it in on the C++ side or the scripting side.

There's a HUGE community to get help from. That's a wonderful thing some days! And the Indies who are workin' on other stuff tend to help each other out - good example was that I talked to Justin from 21-6 after playing a bit with the beta of Orbz 2.1, and noticed that he made Ogg encoded sound work a lot better than my implementation. I asked him about it, and he just packed up the engine/audio directory, and sent it to me, fixing all my problems in a single .zip file!

Speed is good. Trajectory Zone is an example I'll use (since it's my project ;-) Scorched3D and TrajectoryZone share a lot of the same hertiage - Scorched Earth is the inspiration for both of 'em, but we took very different development pathes. I finally checked out Scorched3D on one of my Dev machines. PIII 400Mhz, dual processor, LOTS of RAM, 64MB TNT2 (what a bastardized card - still can't see why they released that, or how I ended up with one ;-) . TZ does not run perfectly on it (which is why I created some modifications to the particle system - I added an LoD system for particles, and added it as a Code Snippet for the community to use), but it's very playable, usually running at 25 - 30 FPS after the modifications I made to the particle system (I beat the hell out the particle system. Imagine a mushroom cloud from a nuke, made entirely with particles and does collision detection with the terrain. Now imagine 20 or so on the landscape at once while players are going nuts. That's how badly I abuse particles ;-) Scorched3D is NOWHERE near as playable, even after I turned all the settings down (no animated water, low textures, etc. etc.,etc.) It does really well, and handles multiple players pretty well (NOTE: as long as you aren't doin' stuff like 3000+ poly models with no LoD!) So, it's pretty good performance.

If there's one complaint I've got, it's the documentation. It needs to be better. However, they are working on Torque 1.2 right now, and that's one of thier priority items - better and more current documentation. However, what the documentation lacks, the community makes up for - cruse the forums, and you'll find the answer 9 times out of 10.

If you've got any more questions, feel free to email me.

21-6 Productions is one of the studios developing games with the Torque Game Engine offered by GarageGames. It's a bit of a shameless plug, but today is the launch day for our title Orbz 2.0, which is being released for Linux, Mac, and Windows simultaneously, along with a demo for each platform.

We really believe in developing fun and interesting games for both the Linux and Mac platforms. We don't just believe in doing so just because it's "the right thing", but also because there is money to be made. The article mentions Marble Blast, another TGE-powered title, and the Mac and Linux sales have been substantial. Certainly nothing for a small, independently-financed game studio such as ours to turn our noses up at.

This is what our studio is attempting to do, and though it's too early to tell how successful we'll be, we believe it's the best route to a self-sufficient indie studio. Successes like Popcap and GameHouse are inspiring, and give one roadmap to being self-sufficient. Another good example is Small Rockets.

In our case we are working very closely with GarageGames as our primary publisher/distributor. Between their help teaching us how to handle PR and marketing, their willingness to give advice on how to be successful, and our own attempts at networking, we think we will be a successful indie in the not-too-distant future. A good example of such cooperation was last week's MacWorld in San Francisco, where we helped run an arcade station for GG showing their title Marble Blast and our title Orbz (small, shameless plug). By joining them in SF for a few days, we were rewarded by making several contacts for future game development work and possible OEM deals.

This is how indies can "compete" with the big publishers.

Dave Myers

21-6 Productions, Inc.

With respect to independent game developers, there is no comparison between the GarageGames deal and what ID offers. Indies are the future of innovative gaming and arming them with AAA technology, a publishing deal, and a thriving community for only pennies will result in gaming experiences you wouldn't have imagined were possible. The big traditional publishers are looking for "hits", not innovation - from game studios with a track record. That's a hard burden to overcome for an independent game studio with little or no budget.

Therefore, when comparing the two engine models discussed in this thread so far - alternatively consider more than just the financial differences. ID gives you a lot of expensive technology and leaves the rest to you. GarageGames gives you awesome technology, a publishing deal, and great community - all for $100. For an "indie", there really isn't a better deal on the planet.

To help put some perspective on my perspective, I feel I should point out that I am the President of 21-6 Productions, an independent game studio currently using the Torque Game Engine from GarageGames to build our cooperative multiplayer, action-RPG called Myrmidon.