Q3+ in Review

Good evening Torque people! We've had a lot of big news in the past few months and I deferred sharing this stuff directly with the community, mostly because we've all been too busy and focused on development and releases to take time out for things like, introducing our new CEO! I'll get to that in minute, we've got a lot to catch up on.

July

Our big news in July was the hiring of Lou Castle, our new CEO. Many of you know our previous CEO, Josh Williams from his early work in the Torque community on documentation, later on 3rd party product management, Torque 2D, and eventually, all things GarageGames. Josh has added tremendous value to the company in his time as CEO, serving as a personal mentor to me and many others. Under his leadership, we partnered with Microsoft to deliver Torque X, a high-end engine and tool set for the XNA platform. Biggest of all though, Josh and founders (Jeff, Rick, Tim, Mark) came together to create a great merging of vision and ideas with IAC, our parent company.

The purpose of IAC's investment was to launch InstantAction.com, a web destination for rich, multiplayer gaming. A lot has happened since then, much of which confirms that the opportunity in web games is phenomenal. id launched Quake Live. Cartoon Network created Fusionfall. Social games, primarily on Facebook, have really exploded. More and more games are being designed to deploy to the web and / or increasingly leverage it's virality. This makes games cheaper to develop, deploy, and market. These are big democratizing trends that we've always tried to support and leverage in our own games and technology.

There have also been major developments in the industry we didn't expect. The iPhone has to come in as the biggest (pleasant) surprise. The iPhone (and hopefully future phones as well) provides game developers access to the same kind of social plumbing as today's dominant social networks. Agon, Openfeint and Scoreloop are all good, game focused examples, but there's also the lower level end user connectivity that Apple provides, letting you recommend apps to people through the App Store, download / install / run them on the fly. It's the accessiblity of the web on the go--a really beautiful thing, much sooner than we expected.

So, much has changed and our vision for InstantAction is changing with it. I expect Lou's leadership to bring the same kind of spectacular results we had under Josh's tenure. For some further detail, you can read Lou's thoughts on the future of InstantAction in this Gamasutra interview.

Quote: "I really believed in the mission of GarageGames from the very beginning, which was to connect developers directly to consumers. So that's something we'll be looking at doing a better job of -- improving the Torque tool set. It's already pretty darn good, very, very robust, but even making it better and investing a lot more time and energy into that, and really giving those indie developers an ability to publish, really publish. Not just download or distribute, but give them a full publishing platform. That's really exciting to us."

This isn't just a lip service commitment to Torque. Lou is 100% behind this and I'm thrilled about it. It's wonderful to be in a position where we can keep building up the Torque team and realize a bigger vision for the tool set. Lou has a rich record of accomplishment in games, most recently at Electronic Arts where he created Boom Blox with Stephen Spielberg, and I expect Torque to move faster than ever to keep up with ambitious pace and requirements of Lou's new games projects for InstantAction.


In other consequential July news, we'll be relocating our office headquarters from Eugene, OR to Las Vegas, NV. Our existing Portland, OR office, already primarily focused on web development for InstantAction will grow, but game development and Torque will be in Las Vegas. Obviously, this is a big, potentially disruptive change in the short term. We've tried to time the move with as much of a lull as we'll ever get in development. Most of the Torque team will be making the move in November and December, with everyone firing on all cylinders in Las Vegas by the first week of January. Because we've got so many fantastic remote development partners (Sickhead, Rene, Luma, GameClay, Mythos Labs, Melv, Phillip, Chris), I don't expect we'll even see much of a hitch our development productivity.

August & September

First stop in August for the Torque team was SIGGRAPH. We met with the Sickhead crew and had a blast. This was my first time to New Orleans, but I'll definitely come back. The lectures were very good, the food and drinks even better.


The latter half of of August I spent traveling in Europe. My first stop was Gamecom and GDC in Cologne, Germany where I met with some press outlets and did a *lot* of Torque 3D demos for studios and publishers. I also met with Rene Damm in Cologne (who drove 5hrs to see me, thanks Rene!) before heading to the UK where I did some more interviews, met with some Torque developers, and did more demos. Whew!


By mid-September, we were all prepped and ready for Austin GDC. I made the hop back across the Atlantic and met up with the Torque crew just in time to see the gorgeous new shiny from Sickhead's Pacific Demo.

More September high points: Josh and Lara Engbretson spin off to create games under "Mythos Labs." Josh is still lending us his very valuable time on Torque, and Lara continues to create great tutorial videos for all the new Torque 3D features, but both of them are now focusing their considerable energies on creating a new game. I can't wait to see it!

Also, Pat Wilson forms GameClay. Read all about that here.

At the end of September, we finally pulled the beta label off Torque 3D. We've already got a lot of great Torque 3D 3rd party add-ons and resources to jump start your project. That's really exciting. I've been really happy with the reaction from the press and the community. Lot of you seem happy about it as well. We'll do our best to keep up the breakneck dev pace and even step it up further. Check out Develop's coverage of the release.

October

No rest for the weary... October 1st I jumped back on a plane for Johannesburg, South Africa. I've been a fan of Luma's work for a long time and as you may have read last week, we're going to be working with them a lot more closely on Torque, so visiting them was well overdue. I got a chance to visit the offices, hang out with Sven, Luke, Dale, Paul and the rest of the Luma crew. They were awesome hosts (thanks so much guys!)



I also made my way to rAge, an annual consumer games expo and LAN in Johannesburg. Cool show! Finally, I got to meet Gerhard in person. He showed me some of the stuff he's been working on and we talked about ways to bring more of that to the Torque community.

What's next?

A little rebranding. One long overdue change we're going to make with this community is sunsetting the GarageGames brand in favor of Torque. Torque is widely recognized brand in games and it communicates exactly what we want when people arrive here. We make games technology, not games. Of course, the "we" here is excluding the pillar of our company which does make (and publish) games, but in an effort to focus and make things clearer here, in this community, we're going to be leaning into the Torque brand and away from GarageGames. You'll be seeing the url change from garagegames.com to torquepowered.com. You'll be seeing some of the branding on this site change too. Our goals here are the same as GarageGames founders': create tools for connecting game developers with consumers. If we do this right, developers will have a full tool chain of resources to bridge the divide between having a great game idea, seeing that vision emerge on screen, and getting that creation in front of an audience.
At torquepowered.com, we are focused on enabling developers to create their vision as quickly and painlessly as possible. In the future, you're going to see more and more tool chain options that cover the next step, distribution and publishing. Torque 3D currently supports all the most attractive distribution options by packaging your game for PC, Mac, Web, Xbox 360, Wii via the Torque toolbox. Simple iPhone deployment from the same interface is coming soon as well. What about publishing? We want to provide automated tools for packaging and publishing your game to the best platforms. Facebook, InstantAction, Steam, iPhone (with Agon, Openfeint, or Scoreloop) integrations are currently in the works, and you'[ll see some (if not all) of these roll out in 2010. Publishing a game isn't "Youtube" easy, but that's the vision we're driving for.

More blazing fast Torque 3D development. A 1.1 preview blog is in the works.

Torque 2D. Big stuff coming in future blogs. Stay tuned.

More website improvements. We launched a brand new website in January this year and we've been making incremental improvements to the design and functionality ever since. More big stuff is coming to vastly improve the community side of the site. A big part of our vision is to make finding the answers you need easier and faster. I think you'll like our solution :)

iPhone! Read this blog if you missed it.

More travel for me. I'm going to be in San Francisco Wed-Fri this week to meet with some of our partners and attand the Virtual Goods Summit. If any of you San Francisco Torque people want to look me up while I'm down there, shoot me and email or say "hi" at the Summit.

Alright, that's a wrap. Thanks for reading! Questions or feedback in the comments are welcome.