Day One - Roundtables

Partnerships with GarageGames

At this roundtable I sat down with a group of people gathered around Brett Seyler, GG’s VP of Corporate Strategy & Partnerships, and Eric Fritz, GG’s Marketing Manager, to discuss ways in which developers can work with GarageGames. While the conversation diverged at some times into publishing with the Garage, talking about things like metrics to offer developers on sales, landing pages for each game in the Garage store, name and email information on customers purchasing a 3rd party developer’s game from the store, etc – the main focus was on partnering with GarageGames.

Several ways that you can do this. One way is to create an add-on pack, also known as a content pack. Brett says these are very popular items. GarageGames likes content packs so much in fact that it was one of the reasons they bought out a small development house that is well-known for its content packs (BraveTree) a few years ago. Another way to partner with GG is to offer up support for Torque, which means core improvements to the engine, like the RTS Starter Kit, which actually revamps some of the code base to turn TGE into more of a strategy engine than an FPS engine. If you’re someone who has had a lot of experience dealing with Torque and you’ve also had previous teaching or lecturing experience, then you may consider getting involved with the Torque Bootcamp program, which pays up to $1K for a one day session that you teach, travel expenses included. If you’re an educator looking to license Torque technology, they have special licenses for educational use or small team training. One final way is to create a tool for a Torque engine, like the Overlord management system or the Torsion IDE.

If you’re interested in any of the above, Brett would be the primary contact but Eric is also available as well.

The “Other” Indie Technologies

At this table, we all basically gathered around Ben Garney, GG’s Torque Technologies Director, to throw out opinions on other tools out there on the market for use by indie developers. This pretty much means low-cost engines (up to a few thousand dollars) and free, licensed tools.

One of the first to be mentioned was Flash, which was cited for its nice limited graphical requirements, an open-source action script runtime, and action script 3 itself. Obviously there are performance limits to Flash, but that in itself can be a plus, as it limits you in scope to something that’s usually more manageable. The built-in IDE isn’t all that good either, but there isn’t a 3rd party one with a debugger. Other popular mentions were the RAD game tools (Granny, Miles, Bink, etc), though one strike against them was the lack of indie licenses (Miles, for example, costs $3K) and FMOD, which is an awesome sound library that’s way better than Direct Sound. While FMOD is also $3K and doesn’t have an indie license either, it does have a hobbyist/shareware license.

Some less popular (in the group) but also notable mentions were the OGRE and Unity engines. OGRE was noted to be a wonderful graphics engine, but someone mentioned that it has no game toolset. Unity wasn’t widely experienced either in the group, although one person said it was less frustrating than Torque and gave him a much faster development time. Ben’s take on it was that it had a lot of cool little stuff, but not a lot of big stuff. Everyone also agreed that it still had a lot of bugs, which was hopefully solved somewhat with the version 2.0 release.

Ben also put forth some tools he considers priceless to a developer, like Visual Assist X and Visual Studio with IncrediBuild, or jEdit instead and also Torsion for torque script. Icecream, a GCC alternative to IncrediBulid, was mentioned by another group member. If you’re a JavaScript developer, there’s Firebug in addition to Firefox.

As time ran down, people just started throwing out general suggestions for areas of development. Links won’t be included here but you can Google them easily enough

• Physics
• ODE
• PhysX
• Newton
• Bullet
• Tokomak
• Networking
• Raknet
• HawkNL
• OpenTNL
• Engines/Frameworks
• Blitz3D/Blitz Basic
• Dark Basic
• SDL
• GTK
• GLUT
• Crystal Space
• C4
• Delat3D
• Open SceneGraph
• Wintermute
• Gnome3D
• jMonkey

Day Two - Keynote