Comments on: Making games a game?

By: Stodge

Stodge — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 12:12:43 +0000

Yes! I used to enjoy re-inventing the wheel, but now I’m older and my attention span is fad….

I got tired of re-inventing the wheel. That’s why I used to like Torque; it gave me a basic FPS with minimal (ok zero) effort. Until I kept hitting flaws/limitations at which point I gave up. This was a few years ago though so it’s no doubt improved somewhat.

On a side note - many people mock Torque for various reasons, but they miss the point that you get an older AAA engine (is it still classed as a AAA engine?) for a low price and it’s fairly feature complete. The vehicle physics are rough, but for many games that’s sufficient. You get solid scripting, multi-player support, scriptable GUI, networking, combined interior/exterior and reasonable terrains.

Sure it can’t push a lot of polygons round in comparison to more recent engines and it (TGE) doesn’t support shaders. But for most indies and even for mockups and demos, it’s more than sufficient and gives you a usable, decent asset pipeline and gets you up and running in next to no time. And it’s cross platform. But still many don’t “get it”.

By: Jeff Murray

Jeff Murray — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:52:17 +0000

I totally agree… the more time we can spend concentrating on building the game and not on button rollovers, the better! I’m a big fan of re-useable code and third party tools

By: Stodge

Stodge — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:26:15 +0000

It’s funny but people looking for one click game creators usually get mocked in forums etc. I must be getting old because sometimes I wish I had something like that. Say I want to make a game with a slight twist I don’t have the time to sit down and write it all, even using existing technologies. So I wish I could click a button, have a basic game prepared/developed in front of my eyes so I can concentrate on gameplay instead of technology. Guess I’m tired of inventing the wheel. It’s like designing GUIs in Netbeans. Sure I could do it all by hand and learn how to lay out forms and dialogs, but I’d much rather concentrate on the applicaction logic.

Was that even on topic? Hmmm..