[casual_games] Torque? Popcap? Or DIY?

[Juan Gril]

Hey Michael. I'll give you my own opinion on TGB, as I'm on my second game
using it. But this is the opinion of a Game Designer/Producer, and the
Programmer in both games thinks very differently than me :). He is cced so
I'll let him pitch in his thoughts.

TGB was good for us because:

   - It provided a stable build of the game at most times, and we only
   had to deal once with hardware incompatibility, which after so much begging
   at the TGB forum (and a help of a good friend at GG) we had them fix it for
   us. That was the only bug that QA reported btw, after testing the game in a
   plethora of OSs and hardware.
   - It had functions that, although cumbersome, were already done so
   once we figured out how to use them we could create things pretty quickly
   compared with having to do our own framework and a game at the same time.
   - All this have been done using TorqueScript, which as bad as it can
   be it got the job done and was a nice step into PC games for an ex
   Flash/Director developer.
   - I work on a Mac, Nicolas (the programmer) works on a PC. We are
   6,000 miles away from each other. We use SVN to sync our files. We have full
   compatibility in what we do (he programs, I script levels, we both add
   graphics to the game) even though we use different operating systems. TGB
   set me Windows free.

TGB has been bad for us because:

   - It has gotten Nicolas on his nerves :), for all the reasons you may
   be well aware of if you did a game with it.
   - It's a DOG. Our first game with it needs a 1ghz machine to run
   properly and it's a very simple game (Puzzle Detective).
   - We are still using 1.1.3, and GG is asking us to upgrade to TGB
1.5every time we report a problem, ever since TGB
   1.5 was in beta. A) We never use beta software for production, and B)
   We never switch framework software in the middle of development. So we are
   pretty much on our own now (we started this project before TGB 1.5 was
   final), until we finish this project. And yes, if you are wondering, any of
   our games run on TGB 1.5 if we try to run them from it.
   - Because it was a dog, and the event model usually failed to report
   events, Nicolas started creating his own drawing functions instead of using
   TGB's. Which beats the purpose of using a framework when you are creating
   one anyway.
   - GG keeps working on that WYSIWYG tool that IMHO is good for 15 year
   olds to do bad clones of their favorite games only. What professional
   developers need is better performance and a better language (Adobe knows
   about this and it's no surprise AS 3 is what it is and the performance of
   Flash 9 compared to 8 is what it is).

I take full responsibility of having chosen TGB to build our downloadable
games. It has been good and bad for the reasons mentioned above. But if I
force my team to use it again on another project, they'll kill me.

64% of people who were asked what framework they use by the IGDA Casual
Games Quaterly said they were using their own. That's a LOT of developers,
so they all can't be wrong. Depending how many people you have on your team
+ their skills + time for development, you can decide what to do. If you
have TGB's source, and you are building on top of it, it doesn't matter if
GG dissappears one day. But if you consider that building your framework on
top of it is a bad idea, start working with SDL and create your own.

Cheers,

Juan
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