[casual_games] Torque? Popcap? Or DIY?

[Brian Meidell Andersen]

When we first started out, we had to decide between these same options, 
and we ended up going with DIY.
For most people, I think this is a nutty approach, so I'd like to 
explain why we ended up going with it (hopefully saying something useful 
along the way).

We are two people in our company, and we are both used to work together 
for years working on "big" triple-a console games.
Ultimately we want to do more indie-like titles, but the casual games 
market is a well established market that seemed fun and simple to start 
with.
When we first started, we evaluated a bunch of different engines, both 
open source and cheap ones. Most of the ones mentioned by other people 
in this thread were included in the list.
Ultimately we chose DIY for these reasons:

1) We have long term plans for what we want to do with the engine, and 
we didn't see any of the evaluated engines as a good fit for both our 
short term and our long term goals.
2) We are stodgy and old and a lot of the engines simply didn't work 
like we preferred them to
3) We have a good deal of industry experience and knew exactly how to 
write an engine
4) Our plans lend themselves to gradually building our engine tech while 
producing viable products along the way

For DIY to make sense, I think these conditions need to be satisfied:
1) None of the engines you can afford fit well with your long term 
goals, and
2) This is not the first time you are writing a game engine
3) You aren't on a tight schedule

If any of these conditions are not met, I would definitely not go with DIY.

I hope this was of some use.

Regards,
Brian

-- 
Brian Meidell Andersen
Programmer/ Founder
The Game Equation
http://www.thegameequation.com