Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope to see more interesting articles in the future

I realize that I’m beating a dead horse since this topic and the horse died late last year. But I feel like I must defend GG a bit. I am unsure as to what Bjorn expected GG to provide. They give you tools and a community that is very supportive. the lack of a dedicated on-call support staff doesnt mean that Garage Games is lacking in support. I have a learned a lot since I’ve started using Torque and 3d gamestudio which I also use. I do not feel that GG misleads developers into thinking that Torque is a magic bullet that will answer all of thier questions. Further I believe that GG is very good about supporting the indie game industry. Like it or not, they’re one of the few indie publishers that isn’t a major portal. I have also seen several games that have been made with torque that are not published by GG as well. When I first started with torque i thought that GG would be my only option but thanks to its forums and forums like indiegamer.com i see that i have several other options. Sonicron stated his opinion and I respect that. My opinions are based on my own personal experience with GG. I think every developer has his own path to follow with regard to what works for his/her game.

If someone comes with any criticism they are usually attacked by members of the staff or other users. Personal attacks on the forum or the chat room are not unheard of. That is not a sign of a healthy company or community.

Jeff Tunnell is often running around trying to defend everything in the most powerful way he can. My advice is, be honest to yourself and everyone else and repair the flaws instead of defending them until it is too late.

Just to make it clear, I have nothing against the tools they provide. It is GarageGames itself that left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.

I think it’s very useful that people like soniCron give his opinion against GG. He gave us reasonable ARGUMENTS. And then Jeff came and gave us his counter-arguments, wich is all very healthy.

Thanks to soniCron i have this very enlightening about GG. And it helps whoever reads this to know more about reality.

Sadly, that project is now cancelled but I enjoyed working with the developers at GG and their suite of tools was far superior to anything I’ve worked with in the 6+ years that I’ve been a professional game developer. We’re a company that can afford pretty much any toolkit, SDK, or graphics engine under the sun and we purposely chose Torque after a very rigorous testing phase.

Independent developers should be thrilled that they have such a cost-effective solution at their disposal.

soniCron, you just aren’t off by a mile. You’re on the wrong planet.

No question, at times the documentation is lacking. Also, much of the product coming out of the GG community is really disappointing and unpolished/uninspired. Partly I think the reason for that is that the engine is quite massive for an indie sized undertaking — so most people never end up doing anything very fresh or polished. I think (hope?) they are addressing this with Torque2D. We’ll see if the products coming out of the community improve with this new, distilled engine.

As for the Torque community “trapping” newbs — well, unfortunately there’s very few products that have gotten to the state of polish that would allow them to go elsewhere. But they certainly didn’t trap me - the only trapping that occurs is that many people within the community get so enamored of GG they they become blind to other opportunities. That’s not really GG’s fault.

I definitely prefer the IndieGamer.com forums for figuring out the business aspect of things — the primary contributors have found ways to make a living out of their work, which is something I intend to do (hopefully starting in less than a week). There are people that make a living on games in the GG community as well, but there is far less “chatter” regarding business issues on their forums so it is less informative in those regards.

If GG has one problem it is that the technology that they provide is bigger than themselves — it started out as the engine used by a bigger company, and it’s been built even bigger by the community. This is a problem because it may have gotten too big for them to document and polish everything. Providing support to the size of community that they’ve got (with the generally low level of expertise of many people trying to use the engine) is not an easy thing. Perhaps it’s a bit presumptuous to expect that the community that enjoys writing code for the engine will also enjoy writing documentation for the engine, but it’s worth a shot. If the community is willing and capable, more power to them.

In short:
-I now have my own game, developed in 10 months on technology that I own (I owe them no royalties).
-I have been given a plethora of press opportunities through GG.
-I was able to branch out outside of GG with the help of the GG community — others fail to do so at their own fault

I’m not a GG fanboy — in fact I’ve gotten in arguments on their forums with some who would prefer if I put more effort into promoting projects from the GG community. But I do think they are an incredible company, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. I would either be making flash games or hell-crunching at Sony. The verdict is not yet in whether I’ll make a decent living off my first product, but hell, at least I got here.

-Andy Schatz (Dr. Willoughby)

I am glad that you are satisfied with GarageGames. However, there are many who are not. I am one of them. I am also aware that there is much about GarageGames I am unfamiliar with, and have willingness to recognize and admit that. I am firm in my opinion about GarageGames (sans the tools), but am clearly willing to be further enlightened about the company in order to more maturely form my opinion.

If I didn’t have the courage to stand up for my beliefs, I wouldn’t have approved Jeff’s comments, or yours, for publication — I would have simply avoided the issue altogether. I am sure you can see that.

Regards, again,
Xavier.