[casual_games] Torque? Popcap? Or DIY?

[John Szeder]

Playfirst has been evangelizing their engine for some time now and at a
glance it appears usable and I think at least one person I know has shipped
something on it, but I haven't looked at it personally.

 

I chose the Popcap framework for a project quite some time ago and it is
almost ready to ship. The developer I had working on it has had nothing but
good things to say.

 

After those two, I am not sure what I would look at. You need to ask
yourself a few questions:

 

1)       Do you need it on the mac? (This may be old information but there
wasn't a mac version of popcap's framework a while ago)

2)       Do you need to have an embedded flash/activeX version?

3)       Who is distributing it?

 

Come to think of it though, there was a great little presentation at one of
the casual games summits on different tech frameworks:

 

http://www.casualgamessummit.com/agenda.html

 

Look at the Game Technology Face Off for examples of how people took some
game assets from one of the popular break out clones (assets were provided
by the keen folks over at Reflexive) and each panelist applied some
engineering time against different tech platforms and shared the resulting
materials with everyone on the website.

 

What was really interesting to me was that each of the games felt slightly
different, and not necessarily as a result of technology, but to me it felt
like each person really made a point about how their business looks at
making games.

 

Play them for yourself when you have some time and see if you agree.

 

  _____  

From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Michael Lee
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 3:19 PM
To: casual_games at igda.org
Subject: [casual_games] Torque? Popcap? Or DIY?

 

First, some quick background info. A friend and I recently started a game
dev studio a few months ago and decided as our first game project we'd do a
simple implementation of Picross with the goal of completing such a project
in a few months. To facilitate this goal after some research and advice we
decided to use Torque Game Builder as a game engine, that way we wouldn't
have to worry about creating our own engine and instead could focus on
building art assets, filling the game with content, and ultimately pushing
the game out in a short time span.

 

So now a few months later we've succeeded in that goal and just
self-published our game, Simple Picross, this week. Overall I want to say
working with TGB was an "interesting" experience especially dealing with
some major issues with the latest releases. It required some fair
modification of the source code and frankly without access to the source
there would be no way the project could have been completed.

 

We're deep into developing our second title which is also using TGB, but
we've started doing some longer planning for future projects and I'm
beginning to wonder if using Torque is a long-term viable solution. I know
there are a few larger casual game studios that use some variation of Torque
or TGB including Large Animal Games and PocketWatch, but it definitely
doesn't seem to a real popular choice. Additionally, in the few e-mails I've
had with publishers/portals and just by general comments I see around the
web it seems a lot of portals and publishers would rather you didn't use
Torque. And the buggy releases of Torque haven't given me a great impression
and I don't see why it would improve in the short-term.

 

Basically we're newbies to this and I'd like to get some idea what people
with more experience than I have think. Should I just continue using Torque?
Should I switch to some of the more popular choices out there like the
Popcap framework? Or should I just bite the bullet and develop our own
internal solution? I don't mind having to learn something new, I'm just more
concerned about going with a choice that makes it easier for us when working
with other people in the future.

 

Thanks

 

Michael Lee

Ludoko Studios

http://ludoko.com <http://ludoko.com/>  

 

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