The Serious Art of Designing Fun

What do you do if you have limited time and budget? You go 2D!

Let's face it - my main focus is on getting a game out there as quickly as possible. The sooner I get the game done, the sooner I'll see profits. Any development corners that I can cut (without reducing quality) increases my chances of success.

The issue with 3D art is the amount of time taken to create it. You need to do 3D modeling, you need to texture the models, and if you have characters who animate, you'll need to invest some time into building a skeleton, creating a skinned mesh, and then creating animations for the model... and that's just the effort required prior to putting together a game level!

On the other hand, doing 2D just requires a good paint program and a passable 2D level editor. To that end, I'm looked for an all-in-one solution and found one in Torque Game Builder by GarageGames. To be honest, I didn't actually spend that much time looking. I had used the Torque Game Engine (TGE) previously and I was very impressed with the engine and its documentation. As a result, my decision to start my exploration with GarageGames' 2D solution was a no-brainer.

Like its 3D brethren, Torque Game Builder is packed to the brim with development features you would need to build a 2D game. After going through some of the basic tutorials, I was able to slap together a non-interactive 2D demo fairly quickly. The only downside to the engine is the documentation - some of the tutorials look to be outdated (the tutorial on creating datablocks in just plain wrong). The good news is that the reference documentation looks to be up-to-date albeit a little sparse in details. But then again, I was playing around with the demo version...

For me, the real test is the ease in which the engine lets me slap together my game prototype. I should have a fairly good idea by the end of the week.