GarageGames Announces Torque 2D Support of Tiger

GarageGames writes "GarageGames, creators of the popular indie-focused Torque Game Engine, announced at MacWorld 2005 that their new Torque Game Engine will support Apple's OS X platform, Tiger. Torque 2D is all about rapid development for games. It takes care of the technology, and the developer can focus on gameplay and art. By extending the current Torque Game Engine platform, indie developers will have a powerful tool to compete in the exciting and growing arena of 2D gaming. In addition to Torque 2D's support of the upcoming Tiger OSX, other GarageGames products like the Torque Game Engine 1.4, Dark Horizons: Lore Gold, Torque ShowTool Pro, Zap! and many more will also be supporting Tiger."

Comments

Why 2D matters

[voice of unreason]

In answer to the questions about why 2D matters, 2D is used a lot now for indie games, which is Garagegames's focus. 2D gaming is growing because indie gaming is growing. You may never see a game in your local CompUSA that uses 2D, but there are a lot of new 2D games being produced and sold over the Internet. Furthermore, by using 3D acceleration technology for 2D, you can make much better 2D games than used to be possible. Rotating sprites, per-pixel alpha blending, and additive blending are all now easy and fast. Search the indie gaming sites and you'll see that there's some great stuff out there.

Re:Why 2D matters

[Mr.Wiggin]

Here are some examples of hardware accelerated 2D games for you (just to prove this guy has a point).

Starscape by moonpod
Wik & the fable of souls by reflexive
alien hominid by thebehemoth All these games are good (IMO), 2D and hardware accelerated. The first 2 have free demoes available and you can just buy online but the last one shows the problems that go with success. Alien Hominid was lucky enough to get a publishing deal and is available on PS2 and GC, but as a result they haven't made a PC version. So there is no free demo and if you buy it you have to wait for the snail mail CD to arrive. All the games above could be implemented without hardware acceleration, but you would need an extremely powerful PC to run it. It isn't just the number of sprites being thrown around it is also the colour blending special effects being displayed. So maybe there are new markets for 2D even amongst graphics whores.