[casual_games] Torque? Popcap? Or DIY?

[James Terry]

As many others have said, Unity does look interesting, but not being
able to develop on a PC, when such a large portion of the market is on
the PC makes it rough.

 

Here are some basic pros/cons of the different solutions:

 

Popcap - decent framework, but no Mac support whatsoever, which is a
large drawback in the casual space, even though Macs aren't as big a
part of the market, you get more face time with less total games
available on the Mac

 

PlayFirst - decent framework, but you have no option for the source of
the framework, if you encounter a bug, you have to submit a bug report
and wait for the next version of the framework when it is fixed, large
drawback if you encounter this towards the end of a project. Also ports
to Mac and ActiveX, which is nice for a bigger market.

 

Unity - looks decent, but no PC development support yet, and unless all
your developers have Macs, you aren't going to be touching it

 

TGB - a lot of stuff in here, there are support and documentation
issues, but having the source to the engine you are working with is a
huge boon when you are trying to solve problems. We've done 3 games with
Torque, and while it causes its share of headaches, it works and has a
lot of technology behind it. Our first game, Enchanted Gardens, runs on
a Pentium 450 with 128 MB of RAM. If you are willing to tweak and
optimize a bit, you can get it running on pretty old computers. It
supports Mac with little to no code alterations (change all the right
click calls to Control-Click, etc)  On the fly scripting support is
really amazing as well, and gives you lots of flexibility with testing
and trying new things

 

DIY - You have a lot of work to do building up your technology. Yeah you
can get started with SDL and whatnot, but you have to do a lot of
groundwork to get up to where the others are. Scripting language, GUI
editing, sound, network, multiplatform, compatibility support, you have
a lot of work ahead

 

It really comes down to go with what you need, even with all the
headaches, I'd recommend Torque. You have the source to the engine and
can fix your problems, a decent developer community, on-the-fly
scripting, and easy Mac porting. 

 

James R. Terry
Game Developer
Yatec Games 
(225) 274-1550 Ext. 104
jterry at yatecgames.com
www.yatecgames.com <http://www.yatecgames.com/>  

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