Questions as a beginner

#1 Hey, I am still kind of new to Torque 2D and I came in with barely any experience in C++ or Java. At first I was intimidated by torquescript, because I didn't know what anything did and why the tutorials had me do things a certain way. My first attempt at my own game with torquescript was something of a mess, a blob of hacky, horribly inefficient script that barely worked and would have been nigh impossible to expand upon.

However when I came back to torque with a new idea, I bookmarked the TGB function reference and ctrl f'd it for each object I used to see what all its fields and functions were (then I found the incredibly helpful dump function, which prints an objects methods to console). I quickly picked up the lay of the land and discovered that torquescript is an extremely forgiving language, something like pseudo java. The limit is really your technical problem solving skills, since the syntax is very relaxed (all torquescript variables are strings, eliminating a lot of potential issues). Once you got it working the way you want, you can go back in and easily refactor it, and potentially use it as a template for C++ code or what have you.

So torquescript is an awesome scripting language to start with in my opinion. It teaches you how to problem solve like a game programmer and helps you pick up tricks for doing certain things, both of which I would figure would make learning a real programming language that much easier. Meanwhile you won't spend nearly as long debugging, and if you get stuck, there is an awesome community of programmers here to support you.

Edit: My post was kind of crappy, rephrased.

#2 Torque is definitely worth the $99, especially if you actually plan to release something. Programming is solid with TorqueScript, and much better since they have a documentation up now.

Having previous code knowledge is definitely a plus when you start TorqueScript, as having a good idea of how everything flows will give you a head start when working with it. However, I'd still recommend you go deeper into another language first (Java in particular, very beginner friendly), and not TorqueScript as in some ways things seem somewhat strange at least to me and not exactly the most intuitive. I've only been coding seriously for about a year now and I've picked up tons of languages now, so it's not a lengthy process to learn code; I was mainly more a 3D artist/beginner animator beforehand.

That brings me to another point, which is if you actual plan to go beyond just perusing the coding bits and actually having art assets, it is difficult even as a 3d artist (if you use freeware stuff like Blender, cause I'm a poor 17 year old :P) until you have really set out a pipeline and process suited to you, especially when it comes to animating (a pain in the buttocks with Blender). Keep this in mind if you plan to go beyond the basic art assets provided.