I've been quiet the last two weeks. "Too quiet." There has been stuff going on behind the scenes and it's finally time to write about it.
A few weeks ago we were pondering switching to something other than Torque to make
the game with. Things were discussed, a class was canceled which disrupted the discussions, and some mild drama happened, but eventually two things happened:
1) The Tech Team completed the Tech Demo in
Torque. It took us five weeks to make something barely functional.
2) The Tech Team completed a second Tech Demo in
Game Maker. It took us less than a week to put more stuff in it than was in the Torque version.
The bottom line is that the Tech Team discovered something we've suspected for a while: Torque sucks for entry-level game development if you don't somehow already know how to use it. It has plenty of good points, which you can easily see from the GG website and the games that have been made with it, but it does have some
serious flaws:
1) There is no book for Torque Game Builder. Every book for Torque covers Torque Game Engine instead. This is like trying to teach people how to swim in a pool by demanding that they swim in the ocean first. Even Torque for Teens, which really
should cover TGB, starts with TGE instead.
2) Torque is structured to make it very easy to develop games if you've been through Comp Sci I, or an equivalent object-oriented language class such as Java. We haven't done CS1 yet, though this is entirely the fault of the way the Game Design program is currently structured rather than Garage Games' fault. What
is Garage Games' fault is
this fact
combined with #1 above, because this wouldn't be as big of an issue if there was simply a frakking book on Builder.
3) The Torque Developer Network is under renovation and we can't wait that long. Our project is due at the end of the semester.
4) The tutorials leave a lot to be desired. I think the real problem with them is that they're written by people who know what they're doing, so they're failing to explain things in a way that can be easily understood by people who don't know what they're doing. The Fish Tutorial teaches you how to make The Fish Game easily. It says little about how to make Your Game. Too much copying & pasting of code and too little explanation of what the code does.
Game Maker has none of these issues, and lots of "easy things" that just make things easier which I'll be explaining in another post. Game Maker does have it's own issues, which I'll also be explaining later. There are lots of things that Torque can do that Game Maker can't, but it's a better
entry-level game development environment.
Also, Game Maker is WAY cheaper.
