Blogging In A New Gaming World
If any of you still have your RSS readers connected, you know it has been over a year since I have posted anything to this blog. The reasons are myriad as I’ve been under intense product deadlines, tight NDA’s, and entrepreneurial/company pressures. While NDA’s prevent me from giving you all the full story, suffice it say that all of that pressure is now gone, we got a great exit, and it’s time to start firing up the blog again.
While I still stand by my thoughts that all professionals should blog (see The First Day of the Rest of My Life article), in a world filled with Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Google Plus, etc. blogging is starting to feel quaint. I do most of my everyday posting and observations on my Google Plus account because it is just so easy to click on the +1 button, and instantly be connected to a large audience. However, I don’t want to be a Google sharecropper forever, and longer in-depth posts need the attention and depth that only a blog post can provide.
I am bursting at the seams to get started telling you about my take on the wonderful opportunities that are available in the gaming market today. These opportunities have been building for years, and you should count yourself lucky to be making games right now.
Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big in Games
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Sad Day… R.I.P. GarageGames, Instant Action, Torque Powered
This post on the Torque Powered site says it all…
Today, InstantAction informed employees that it will be winding down operations. While we are shutting down the InstantAction.com website and Instant Jam game, Torquepowered.com will continue to operate while InstantAction explores opportunities with potential buyers for Torque. We thank all of our past and current customers for their support.
- Torque Management
I am mostly posting it here for sentimental reasons.
Google’s Incredible Machine
It was fun to see Google doing an Incredible Machine-like animated logo for the recent July 4th celebration.
Dear Google, Please Take Facebook Out
Dear Google,
This week’s announcement of Open Graph by Facebook, and the privacy concerns it raises, is too much. Even though I am making my living by making Facebook games right now, Google needs to respond to what is happening in FB land, and start your own “real” social network. It is obvious that the world needs a social network, yet there is no real alternative to Facebook. You have been farting around with social network ideas for years, with Orkut, Buzz, and Profiles, but your implementations to date have pretty much sucked. Just bite the bullet, and make a network as easy to use and obvious as Facebook. Please, no more back door attempts like Buzz or Profiles or the gawd awful sharing that is on Reader (it is getting better, but still sucks). My team uses and loves Buzz for one small use case, but it is not something I can ask my non-techie friends or family to use.
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I Think Zynga IS Worth $5 Billion
Traditional game developers are scared to death of what is happening with “social games“, but that is fodder for another post. This post is about the big gasp that went up throughout the game industry when the site Second Shares posted a well through out article that that came up with the $5B valuation.
NOTE: As a corollary to this article about why I think Zynga is worth so much, you should check out why I won’t invest in traditional game publishers.
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GarageGames Name Joins Torque Game Engine In Retirement
OK, I get to be all sentimental again. A month or so ago, GarageGames pulled the original Torque Game Engine off the market. Now, they are pulling the name GarageGames itself off the market, and replacing it with Torque Technologies. I can’t disagree with the decision Brett Seylor, TT VP of Tech and Tools, made to change the name. Torque is a shiny new modern 3D game engine, and they have decided that the idea of programming in a garage is not quite the image they want to project. Even though I understand, it still tugs at my heart strings.
GarageGames Logo and Motto
When Jay Moore and I used to head out on the road to evangelize our idea, we loved every minute of it. It was exciting times doing everything we could to help indies. Having a mission that fills your heart as well as your brain makes you do things you would not normally do, like working for little to no money for a long time, or getting up in front of big crowds to do public speaking (which I hate), or cold calling hardware companies to have them help out at IndieGamesCon.
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PushButton Labs Acquires Rights To The Incredible Machine
As announced today at PushButton Labs, we have acquired the full rights to The Incredible Machine! Although this happened several months ago, we waited on announcing it until the guys at Good Old Games could get it ready for sale, where they have a bundle Mega pack that includes four versions of TIM for $9.99.
Original Incredible Machine in Pixelated Glory
Hit games for their creators are like hit songs for singers, i.e. they stick with you for a long time. When Kevin Ryan, Brian Hahn, and I created TIM at Dynamix back in 1991, I had already been thinking about the game for seven years. Now, here it is 18 years later, and TIM will get an entirely new lease on life. That is 25 years of being involved with TIM, and I have loved every minute of it.
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Torque Game Engine Enters Retirement… Bittersweet For Me
Yesterday Brett Seyler of GarageGames posted a blog announcing the release of version 1.0 of Torque 3D, which is a $1000 updated version of Torque, with new rendering, tools, art pipeline, COLLADA support, etc. It looks awesome, and I know their world-wide team worked incredibly hard on the product. I congratulate them on this release, and wish them great commercial success.
However, buried in a single sentence of the blog was the following statement:
“No matter what the results, there will be other changes to the Torque product line up as well. Biggest of all, as of November 1st, 2009, past versions of Torque (TGEA, TGE) will no longer be available for purchase.”
TGE and TimAste Art
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Flashbang Guys Getting It Right
Flashbang Studios, creators of the portal Blurst, which is filled with their own games such as Off Road Velociraptor, Blush, and Minotaur in a China Shop are really doing things right. They have now self funded five titles and try to come out with a new game every eight weeks (six per year total). All of their games use the Unity web plug in for a nice, high fidelity game experience in the browser on both Macs and Windows machines.
Flashbang's Blurst Game Portal
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PushButton Engine Open Beta Launched
Two days before Game Developers Conference we opened the PushButton Engine site in Beta form to the general public. The PushButton Engine is a Flash game engine released under the extremely liberal MIT Open Source license. If you are interested in Open Source Flash game development, you should check it out!
PushButton Engine Logo
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