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Must... resist... urge....

Damnit, I knew I couldn't resist! Keep your eye on a game called Trajectory Zone. Beta 3 (it's a closed beta, sorry - but you can contact the author for beta signup information) The screenshots only show some of the environments, but you can also see some of the cool random level generation toys and the toys for modders (Trajectory Zone has an IDE in it. Not exactly normal for a game... :-) Or you can take a look here at another couple o' screenshots, including how particle based nuclear explosions look in the game.

However, this isn't just Scorched Earth in 3D. It's got the classic turn based play if you want, or a new simultaneous fire resolution mode (everyone locks in a shot, and they all fire at once), or you can get nasty with it and play the realtime versions of the game. There's just.... LOTS of cool stuff in there. And of course, it's going to be available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.

Sorry - couldn't help but plug the game. I'm the owner of Midnight Ryder Technologies (the company doing Trajectory Zone), and plugging the game is just one of those things that's almost reflex these days :-)

Hm - you've missed how things have evolved recently:

1. BUYING a modern working 3D engine SDK costs between 300K to around a million, depending on engine. Wrapping it costs a few developer years.

Torque. Crystal Space 3D. There's more of 'em to. Personally, I licensed Torque. It cost me a whopping $100 for the license and souce code. If (and only if) the game starts to hit big (in excess of $500k in business for the company, or the publisher I deal with) then I have to move to the 'commercial' license - which is $10k. still pretty good. Of course, some people will say that CS3D is crap (gee, it managed to power an on the shelf retail game that's still on the shelves now - can't be that bad!), or that Torque is too dated (got look at the site, or check out screenshots of Trajectory Zone (still not a lot of content there, but, some pretty nice in game shots of the levels. The engine isn't very dated any more :-)

So, the myth of the quarter-million dollar engine is dead. There's plenty of options to choose from. And since Torque went to $100 to license it, a couple of other engines have done the same (but, truthfully, none of the others have impressed me yet. That could change in the future.)

Plus, using an existing engine cuts WAY down on the QA costs - you already know the engine runs on a diverse set of hardware, since everyone else who's licensed it makes it work (and in the case of CrystalSpace or Torque, everyone is highly likely to share information on quirks, enhancements, etc.) So now what you have to spend time testing is content and game specific stuff.

The game concepts are there - I can already tell ya they are. I was at Indie Games Con '03 (disclosure: I was a speaker there this year and last year. This year's topic: "Surviving Indie Game Development" :-) and talked with a lot of people about what they were working on, etc. There's both brand new concepts, and rethinking of old concepts. Not a single game there didn't have a unique selling point of some sort - something that makes 'em really stand out. (Well, that's not COMPLETELY true. There were a couple o' knockoffs there. But they weren't the promonent games.) Close enough to mainstream to get gamers attention, but different enough to make thier own nitch (GravRally comes to mind.)

It's far from gloom and doom for indies like myself - if you are smart, it's a good time to be an Indie. If you want to make Doom III - well, good luck on getting your day job back :-)

Oh, forgot to cover this: Art. Trajectory Zone was done by a team of 9 people grand total (I'm the owner of Midnight Ryder Technologies, the developer behind Trajectory Zone) So what DO you do to fill up a game like this? Well, in my case Eric Forhan (art director) found people who were willing to work for a percent of profits after it's published. That defrayed the up front costs, and a lot of guys get to see thier name on a box when it comes out :-) But for some of our other titles in the pipeline, we're doing things like licensing content from various places (Gee, I could hire an art guy to model a table, chairs, couch, and stuff for this room. Or, I could buy it all for $40, and reskin the couch to match the room.) which also (if done smart) reduce the overhead for the art budget considerably. Next time, we don't need a team of 9 people - two will suffice, plus our licensed content.

And here's what's cool... the Indie situation continues to improve. Suddenly, someone figured out there's a whole new market segment to sell to. So now there are products and services showing up that are less expensive, and aimed directly at Indie budgets. Heck, if I need to construct and entire city, I can buy all the parts for building, roads, street lights, etc. all in one package for $20! Indies are likely to save time, and reuse the content rather than build new - which means

ven if they're not quite up to the graphical, sound, or dialogue snuff of some major releases

That's the funny thing - many of them were up to snuff graphics and sound. (I didn't get to see FuzzeeeTeevee, so I can't speak about that one.) Not all of the games that appeared there were mentioned in the articles, nor were they in the competition, btw. Anyway - graphically, Dark Horizons: Lore, GravRally (which I can't find any links to at the moment!), and Trajectory Zone (our product) would set side by side with existing retail offerings. (However, don't expect something that looks like the Doom3 screenshots ;-) And sound? Well... pretty good actually :-) Unluckly, I can't show what they all sound like! :-)

Those types of people are great for the industry and it would be better that they sold their own games really well and got noticed by a big company and snatched up as a developer than if they couldn't make any money and had to get a job completely unrelated to video games.

I totally agree - this way, we get much cooler games (I was a huge fan of 21-6's Orbz - very different style of game that ROCKED!) and more innovation, instead of more sequils :-)

Ok, I gotta say it - one of my products had it's premier there at IGC '03. Trajectory Zone showed off for the first time to the public. That was a blast :-) (Keep in mind it's just it's first beta - beta 2 will be comming along here in the next two weeks or so.)

If you are an indie game developer lookin' for feedback, I highly recommend going to IGC next year with your game - there were 25 machine, and during any given ShowOFF session, you could get more face to face feedback about your game than you ever have had the chance to get before. Plus the organizers (GarageGames) did something smart - they also provide feedback forms for people to fill out. So no only do you get face to face feedback, you get 'annonymous' feedback where people don't have to worry quite so much about the effects of insulting the developer ;-) Plus, you get to WATCH them play the game - see what hangs the player up, what makes them laugh or curse, etc. It's unbelieveably great - testing across the Internet doesn't have nearly the power of doing it live.

Oh, and if you haven't looked at our game sneak peek yet... ;-)

Ok, I gotta say it - one of my products had it's premier there at IGC '03. Trajectory Zone showed off for the first time to the public. That was a blast :-) (Keep in mind it's just it's first beta - beta 2 will be comming along here in the next two weeks or so.)

If you are an indie game developer lookin' for feedback, I highly recommend going to IGC next year with your game - there were 25 machine, and during any given ShowOFF session, you could get more face to face feedback about your game than you ever have had the chance to get before. Plus the organizers (GarageGames) did something smart - they also provide feedback forms for people to fill out. So no only do you get face to face feedback, you get 'annonymous' feedback where people don't have to worry quite so much about the effects of insulting the developer ;-) Plus, you get to WATCH them play the game - see what hangs the player up, what makes them laugh or curse, etc. It's unbelieveably great - testing across the Internet doesn't have nearly the power of doing it live.

Oh, and if you haven't looked at our game sneak peek yet... ;-)

Unluckly, I have to agree (keeping in mind I've produced 7 2D puzzle games over the years now). Lots of games just try to capitolize on 'Me too' gameplay style.

Almost none of the games at IGC were 'Me too' games. Everything was fairly fresh and new games. That's not to say they didn't have thier basis from other games at times - GravRally from 21-6 is really just another racing game, but, really innovates in it's execution (the GravMode - stick to any surface, no matter upside down or not! :-) and it's gameplay modes (the Chase mode was cool - basically, it's tag played at 200+ MPH!). Trajectory Zone (full disclosure - that's from my game company) finds it's gameplay core from Scorched Earth. Then cranks it up with realtime play, lots of new options, neat environments, etc. And of course, it's 3D, but much more easy to play than Scorched3D, and moves MUCH faster.

Only one game ran in a browser, and that was a special exception - ThinkTanks has a new version out (Windows only) that runs in the browser. Very scaled down, fits in 3 MB, that sortta thing - basically, it's a sales pitch for the game. Not a single game was arkanoid, tetris, etc - I found that to be just too cool. I don't have a problem with 'inspired by' games, but 'clone of' games just tend to blur together, and really suck because of a complete lack of innovation. (Adding one new block to Tetris is not an innovation ;-)

There's a couple to choose from, but for free engines, IMHO, your best best is Crystal Space 3D. PlaneyShift made use of it successfully - it's pretty good.

However, my tool of choice is Torque which isn't free - it's $100, and you get the source code for it. Damned flexible, and one hell of a community behind it. Go cruse the forums (same site, under Make Games) and check it out. And take a look at the screenshots. I'm currently using it on Trajectory Zone (Mm.... why bother with the link - still no dev pics up there at the moment, even though it's almost done!) and I'm really impressed with it's power - the best $100 I ever spent for game development.

Keep watching - there's a lot more stuff in development using the Torque engine. I've got Trajectory Zone in development using Torque - which means I can support Mac, Linux, and Windows without much more than a re-compile. Needless to say, I'm not the only one thinking that way - the engine is good, and works pretty well on all platforms. This could end up turning into yet another way that Linux and Mac start getting some really good games.

There's also a couple o' other games released using Torque that are Mac, Linux, and Windows - check out Marble Blast (kinda like Marble Madness, but on steroids) and Orbz / Orbz 2.0 (I don't have a quick way o' describing that one - I helped do some beta testing on it, and it's VERY unique.) Hopefully the trend of cross platform games continues - I'd much rather be able to run whatever OS / hardware platform I choose, instead of focusing on Windows because that's where the games are. From a user stand point, it's annoying. From a game developer standpoint, it's REALLY annoying!