... but Garage Games are cooler. We sat down briefly with Josh Williams and Tim Aste to chat about random stuff - that was the interview's actual description on my little notepad, "stuff". They turned out to be really great, fun people and talked about the tech GG vends to indie and student developers while Samwise and I tried frantically to piece together more questions.

It probably would've gone on longer, but Schild demanded I go listen to some Japanese guy talk about punk. Still, good times!

Yoru: We're here at GDC on Friday, we're all tired, ex-drunk... we're here with Josh and Tim from GarageGames, from Oregon; this is F13, and we're going to start talking now. So Josh, tell us about what you do for GarageGames.

Josh: Sure, sure. I'm our CEO and CTO, so I'm responsible for GarageGames as a whole. Anything we screw up is my fault, anything we do right - I got lucky. Yeah, CTO-wise, I set the technology direction, try and make sure we're, overall, doing good, helpful tech stuff.

Yoru: So what's the direction that GarageGames is taking? Because you're doing a lot of middleware and engines right now. What're you looking to do in the future?

Josh: GarageGames was founded with kinda three legs to our mission. One was, definitely, making the middleware, engines, and tools available to independent developers, small studios, and commercial developers. But, in particular, independents and students so they could learn game programming and/or make their own games at prices they could actually afford.

Josh: No one else... When we started, no one else was really doing that, and that's what we've focused the majority of our efforts on for the past several years. We'll continue doing that in full force going forward. We've been going at this for a while now, so we're finally looking at doing the other two legs of our business, which are making our own games, 'cuz that's what we love to do, and helping other people who have made games get out there. In a good-hearted way... we try to be honestly good about it.

Josh: So, with our games, we made Marble Blast Ultra, which has been a successful title on Xbox Live Arcade, and some other games for PC download. Then we want to do more and more game development this year. Then we want to push forward on the whole... I use this term lightly, alright? Publishing. We don't consider ourselves a normal publisher, but sorta publishing other people's games too. Getting them to all kinds of channels. Certainly the consoles, and PC channels too, so, downloadable channels...

Yoru: Okay, so, since you mentioned students and independent developers, how do you particularly target yourself towards them? What do you do that makes you right for them?

Josh: So, for students and universities, we're using over 100 university- and college-level programs. The thing there is, we provide a full-featured engine and toolset that's really pretty competitive with some of the big, expensive commercial engines out there but we do it at, basically, prices that schools or individuals, hobbyists or independent developers can afford. So part of it is the business model, right, the right pricing of the stuff.

Josh: Part of it too, I think, is the philosophy. We try to keep very much in mind, in our development going forward... look, we're an independent developer too, what sorts of technology and tools do we need to make the sorts of games we want to make, and what do other small developers need to make the sorts of games that they want to make? And where do the opportunities lie for small developers?

Josh: A couple years ago we sat down and looked at it and decided to to Torque 2D, which is a 2D extension of Torque. And the reason why is that it was finally becoming viable for developers to develop 2D games, maybe just casual games, and actually get it out to market and be successful with it and have their studios running. So we put the time in and worked a lot of late nights trying to get Torque 2D out the door and keep it going. You know, big dev team...

Yoru: Okay, so, one of the problems, especially, that indie games and smaller companies have is trying to get the word out. What are you doing to try to support them in that manner?

Josh: This is something we haven't done a ton of in the past, but it's something we're really trying to make a big focus over the next 12-24 months. One of the things we're doing is, we just launched the GreatGamesExperiment.com and I think that's a pretty damn cool site for independent developers...

Yoru: I'm a member.

Josh: (laughs) Great! It's cool, because anyone can submit their game and you're up there right with any other game, from Half-Life 2 on to Zelda down to a bunch of other indie games and flash games and whatever...

Yoru: Dwarf Fortress has it's own little site on there too...

Josh: Yeah, awesome, yeah! I just think that's cool; there's no guarantees obviously, nobody can say, "Hey indie developer, put your game up and poof, instantly here's a bunch of traffic!" But you can have your game out there and if people like it, they'll recommend it to other people, they rate it, it gets tagged - games that it's like. A nice database of games to help people browse and find games. So GGE is one thing, and then, going forward, we want to do more with publishing and really helping indies get out to market.

Yoru: So right now you're on PC and Xbox 360. Are you looking at targeting other platforms?

Josh: We're actually... so PC meaning all desktop right? So Windows and OSX... Yeah, we're on Xbox 360 and we're certainly looking at other platforms. More than that I can't say at the moment! (laughs)

Samwise: So, for someone who's just starting out, wanting to make a smaller game, what would make Torque a better pick for them than, say, making a mod for Half-Life or Unreal?

Josh: Well, let's see.. If you're trying to learn game development, versus productizing a game, getting it out for sale... Modding can be awesome, we love modders, modding's great. You can focus. If you're an artist, you can really focus on getting your art into the game, changing the art up. If you're a coder, all those games come with a bunch of assets you can use and focus on gameplay and code. If you're a designer, same thing, you can design levels or whatever...

Josh: So I think modding's awesome. But if you want to actually make games for sale, if you're an independent developer, it's difficult to do if you're modding, generally. You can't go sell a mod, right? So you either have to work with the developer of the game to get approved to do so, or you have to end up porting whatever you did in the mod to some other technology.

Josh: There's other things too, obviously. With modding, if you're a coder, or there's ways you want to stretch the game in ways it doesn't go out of the box, you don't have access to the source code or anything. Which, of course you do with Torque, and as we go on over time, I think our tools are becoming, if they're not already, as powerful as most of what's available in most of the popular modding game engines.

Josh: So there's not a whole lot of reason to continue doing mods, except what's really cool if you're doing mods, is Half-Life mods or Unreal mods you can get an audience. At least, that used to be the case, it seems to be less the case now. There's tons of mods and not tons of examples of small developers doing really popular mods any more, but it can still be a good way to get an audience for your game concept. So I don't know if there's a good answer. I'm not going to say definitely use Torque instead of a mod, I think, shit, do whatever works for you!

Samwise: How about the quality of the toolset? Would you say that Torque is perhaps a bit easier to pick up?

Josh: Oh sure!

Samwise: Have you made any particular tools that really make it simple to crank stuff out?

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. Over the last couple years, that's really what we've been focusing on. So the Torque Game Builder is a 2D tool, but that's literally a sort of click and build, design and gameplay. And then we've been working a ton on documentation, we have thousands of pages of documentation and examples. Starter kits, things that'll help you get started making games. So yeah, that's where a big chunk of our focus has been over the last couple of years. And on the 3D side, we've always had a pretty good set of 3D tools, but that's another area we want to really, really improve over this next year, and make the 3D tools more like the Game Building side of the tool framework.

Samwise: Yeah, that's a big complaint I've had with modding kits. Documentation tends to be really sparse and you have to go and find third-party examples; that's very cool that you're making more of an effort...

Josh: Yeah, we definitely want to. I think it's a helpful thing, right, when you're starting out with games, or even if you already know how to make games and you're already in production, yeah, tools are vital.

Tim: Not to jump into the interview, but what Josh is saying, with the 3D tools at least... People have been watching how much our 2D tools really kick butt, and we've been mostly focusing on those for the past year... But our 3D tools, they're getting a little old, they were the sh- Can I say shit?

Yoru: This is F13. Baby raper.

(laughter)

Tim: They were the shit, basically, in 2001, 2002, but time goes on and we've got some really exciting things on the line for developing our tools right now, to bring them up into line with the commercial-grade stuff... We've got some really cool stuff coming down the pipe, that's for sure.

Yoru: Okay, so what are you doing to help new developers pick up Torque?

Josh: Well, we don't have a big marketing department or anything like that, right?

Tim: Not that big...

Josh: So we offer a free trial version of the Game Builder, and actually anybody can download Torque itself and treat it as a mod thing...

Tim: A lot of our toolset and plugins are available on the site before you buy it.

Josh: And we have the Torque Developer Network wiki, which is great. If you're learning Torque or learning game development, that's a nice user-generated self-help site there. And our forums are really active, there's a great development community out there. So yeah, in terms of picking up Torque and learning Torque, there's the TDN wiki, there's the forums and all the shared resources that all these cool developers put out there and share, but in terms of getting it out to a mass audience, that's not anything we've done a lot of in the past.

Josh: Certainly working with Microsoft with the XNA stuff is helpful. There's a lot of people who are picking up XNA and using that, and it's nice to see Torque there.

Yoru: So, you've been doing a lot of indie game stuff. Have you guys looked at getting into serious games at all?

Josh: Yeah, actually, Torque's actually been used in a lot of really interesting serious games projects. I don't know what all I can talk about, but yeah, many companies and various branches of the various arms of the government kinda look at Torque and use it for stuff...

Yoru: Oh, those arms of the government... (taps nose) Gotcha.

Josh: (laughs) Well, there's one cool one, NASA used Torque for a Mars Rover simulation. A bunch of stuff like that. Yeah, serious games for sure. And, of course, commercial games too.

Samwise: The Torque netcode, I know, is...

Yoru: A lot of people have been talking that up.

Josh: Yeah, the Torque netcode's really good. It goes way back to the days of Tribes and Tribes 2, but we've continued to work on it and improve it. Back then, I try to be modest all the time, but it sort of led the industry, at least in terms of action-oriented networking, and I think we're still in that position.

Yoru: So to conclude, what should we be looking forward to from GarageGames in the next six months?

Josh: In the next six months, we'll be releasing updates to all the engines. Next version of the Torque Game Builder and continued updates on the rest of our engines and tools. And we'll also be kicking more games into production at GG, and you might start hearing about some of those in the next few months. And, check out GreatGamesExperiment, and we'll be talking, at least, with developers privately about our push, going forward, to help 'em get out to a bunch of portals and consoles.

Tim: (sotto voce) Baby raping games...

Pretty much everyone: Baby raping games! (laughter)

Yoru: When can I look forward to Baby Raper 2.0?

Thanks to the GarageGames guys for having a great sense of humor with my hung-over ass. They also had a really cool-looking demo of the Torque Game Engine Advanced integrated with Speedtree running at their booth, as well as a playable Torque platformer station.
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