More GarageGames! There’s a great interview with company president Mark Frohnmayer up on Gamasutra today about Torque X, as well as a few other interesting topics. Like, for example, the fact that Jay Moore has left the company. I didn’t even realise this had happened, but a quick bit of hunting reveals that it occurred almost a month ago. So, it’s probably a bit late for me to be commenting much on it, but I do wish Jay all the best - he was a great spokesman for the company, and was very easy to deal with.
Anyway, all that aside, GarageGames are clearly very excited about the whole Torque X thing, which is the next evolution of their Torque Game Engine. It features increased support for DirectX 10 and Microsoft’s XNA game developers tool-set - from which the beta version of XNA Game Studio Express should be released in a few hours.
Frohnmayer displays a lot of the unchecked excitement that I love about GarageGames - it’s obvious that these guys are doing what they’re doing because they love it. “I think one of the great things about XNA is that it opens up console development to such a wide potential audience of developers,” he says, then goes on to say that what he’d like is to see “more people and more creative energy going into development”.
He also comments that “one of the great things about XNA is that it opens up console development to such a wide potential audience of developers”. Personally, I think it’s kind of a double edged sword; sure, we’re bound to see some great stuff from it, but there’s also going to be a lot of absolute lazy shit. I guess that’s to be expected though, and I’m sure time will weed out a lot of the poorer efforts - and, really, there’s nothing to say that anything below par is going to end up on Xbox Live Arcade because of it.
Torque X does sound very exciting though. “It’s a full featured 2D/3D engine that’s going to be much more accessible to those who haven’t exactly had a lot of C++ experience,” says Frohnmayer. Also great is the fact that it’s fully compatible with the Game Engine, and the Shader Engine, meaning that it can be used to make some seriously professional work. Frohnmayer suggests that 2D games could see a big push from this:
I think that as people start looking at what you can do with 3D hardware in the building of 2D games, such as taking advantage of shader effects, whether it’s displacement mapping, bump mapping or whatever, you can make games that look completely different than any other 2D game you’ve ever seen before. People are going to have a lot of fun exploring in those directions, but aren’t going to have to take the substantial hit that it takes to develop all the content for a 3D game and yet they can make game experiences that look completely new. They can also go down paths like “What is Super Mario Bros. like in a network world?” That sort of thing. Just in terms of games I’m noticing myself playing, coming from a pretty hardcore Quake and Tribes gameplay background, I’m now gravitating towards experiences that are quite a bit simpler in terms of interface and those are often more naturally expressed in 2D.
Me, I’m up for anything that means more 2D games - just as long as they the result of thinking in different directions. I’d give up a thousand Mario clones for just one fresh take on 2D anytime.