Another week closes out for Dream Games

The last couple of weeks have really shown how powerful and charged up the Indie community can be.

Since the announcing of our 90-Day MMORPG Game Design Contest we have seen on our forums an extremely heated up RealmCrafter vs Torque + MMOKIT debate/flame war burst out with all the violence and excitement you normally see in political discussions. We even had to do the much-hated thread moderation. It demonstrated that loyalties exist however, and that is good for both RealmCrafter as well as Torque. Unfortunately sometimes things get personal. Anyway, a bunch of teams have entered the contest and we are going to see some sweet games in a few months! I promise we will keep you posted.

In contrast to the negative, this week has seen the community-led development of a small team from within the MMOKIT community who are volunteering time and braincycles to getting together an instructive demo for new users. This is a tremendous relief to me personally, as I have long designed an extensive demo/tutorial but am nowhere near to working on it due to the amount of developing is still going on. These guys stepped up and are leading a well-managed charge at doing this. It's this kind of thing that really makes the work worthwhile, when you see people putting in real effort to take things to the next level for the greater good.

Dreamer has been working hard on creating some excellent ingame AI creation tools, which was a much-needed feature, I have been fixing oodles of bugs and prototyping some excellent combat and inventory improvements (why is it that as soon as you finish working on something, you suddenly see a better way to do it which requires rewrite :) Every now and then I sit down and play some game and think, you know what, the Torque users should be able to have stuff like this in the MMOKIT, I'm going to make it happen.

Ashtara has been working on some awesome video tutorials for artists using Milkshape, and adding in Gold Member content. She along with Ari of BrokeAss Games (check out Ruin!) are really pushing the envelope of animating in Milkshape for Torque.

At this point we are planning on releasing MMOKIT 1.5 final on Halloween. This will have some thematic drama added to it, no doubt ;)

And now I'm reading all the cool stuff tim Aste posted about TGE 1.5, and seeing the pics!! Gah! Ladies and gentlemen, this is massive stuff heading our way! It's like a revolution in Indie game development is occurring as we speak. With tools like Torque 1.5, ArcaneFX, the various content packs, the MMOKIT, etc., it stands to reason that if you have a budget of < $1000 and a good design, you can create your dream game. These products are all made by people who want to see you succeed and achieve your goals. They save you so much time and money it's almost unreasonable. That is in fact, what all this is about, isn't it?

Get out there and get busy! Oh yes, and as for me, sometime this year I will finally begin working on my own game, after I am satisfied that people who buy the MMOKIT have everything they need.