Stability and Tech Support for Games Made with TGB

#1 I, too, am interested in any answers to these questions, although for other reasons. I'm an artist, and a (very) novice programmer and won't have access to the source for TGB from the start. I'm building my games on a Mac. If, down the road when I've accomplished something that someone else will want, they then have problems with it on a Windows environment, I'm not going to have any idea what to do...

#2 I know I have a bias, but I'll take a stab anyway.

Quote:1) Can anyone who is indie tell me how much of their time is spent on support issues?

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Are you talking about support after the game is made and users give you bug fixes? Because that largely depends on what type of game you make and how complicated your script files are. I can whip up a pretty stable Asteroids game on TGB with built-in behaviors and have little to no support issues, or I can create a much more complicated puzzle game with time management gameplay that will need a lot more QA time to get all the kinks out. But that's true of any engine or rolling your own solution.

Quote:2) When TGB (or Torque games, in general) go live, are they stable? Assume that no modifications or extensions have been made.

If you're making a Windows 2000, XP, or Vista game and don't modify the engine, TGB is very stable. Again, though, this is a complex question and depends, even with scripting, on your game. You could probably make my Asteriods game above and port it back even as far as Windows 98, but certainly larger games would need more help with scripting and/or engine modifications (of which there are plenty of resources inside this community).

Quote:3) Apparently, TGB can publish games to portals. How does that part work?

We have indeed seen hundreds of games published on Big Fish, Real Arcade, Yahoo! Games, Reflexive, Oberon, etc. However, these contracts were worked out between the portal and the studio. So if you're interested in this path, you have to make a solid prototype and network to find the right contacts, just like you would when pitching any game for a distributor/publisher.

Hope that helps!

#3 @Colin: TGB is built so that even novice programmers can get in and prototype right away. One good example of this is Conor O'Kane. He also started as an artist, and within the last two years made the following games using TGB scripting only:

Drone Swarm
Harpooned!
Go Beryllium!

And he has also graduated to iPhone with iTGB: Heat Shield

I would suggest start learning with the official tutorials on the TGB doc pages and work your way from there. At least, that's how Conor and I started! :)

#4 @Deborah - thanks so much for taking the time to respond ! If I may clarify point #1 : I am talking about post launch technical support; bugs, issues, whatever you want to call them. I am not talking about anything that can be resolved with better documentation or communication, only actual faults.

Frankly, I did Windows based telephone support for two years, and I do not want to do tech support for Windows ever again if I can at all help it. My concerns center around how TGB behaves out in the wild. I also wanted to know, generally, how much of an indie's time is spent on these issues.

Many, many indie games I have tried crash on loading screens, for instance. Granted, they were coded from scratch, or written on top of freeware/open frameworks, but still... if I can test for leaks and write a TGB script on a best effort basis, I would like to know that I can publish/release for windows without getting a crap ton of emails.. The sheer number of variations of Windows in common use today would surprise many, even at Microsoft; not to say a thing, of course, about how many people use cracked versions of Windows that have not been updated in eons, or run 3 firewalls - and 4 file sharing programs (don't laugh, I actually saw this once). As a private individual I simply cannot afford to troubleshoot all 13 flavours of Windows out there - even though I know how...

Sorry if I rambled too much. In a perfect world, I could skip past Windows and go straight to a console like the DS or PSP. The fact that one cannot publish to the iPhone without a Mac irks me... but hey, if I were Apple, I'd likely do the same thing. If TGB is sufficiently stable not to choke unless I choke it, then I will feel more comfortable.

Please feel free to comment further if you would like. Better yet, if someone who is actually in post launch with TGB could please comment or address this issue, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance for your replies !

#5 @Deborah - Thank you. I'm working my way through the tutorials right now. I already have several ideas for games – well, more interactive toys really – using mainly behaviors and physics as a way to show what I can do artistically. Conor's games look impressive. Any idea why, with TGB being cross-platform capable, he's only releasing them to Windows? (excluding the iPhone game, of course).

#6 @Damien: Yeah, developing for the PC is always an issue, given the number of variables involved. The best "straight from GG" answer I can give you is a reiteration of what I said above: it will depend on the game, but the current version of TGB has been heavily tested back to Windows 2000.

@Colin: I'm not sure why Conor stuck with Windows only in his first three games. Sometimes developers do not see the reason to support two platforms when one (i.e. Windows) supports 99.9% of their market. Other developers see cross-compatibility as an opportunity to tap a less crowded market. It's all up to the developer!

#7 I don't think Windows is 99.9% of the market anymore. Statistics say Mac owners are about 10% of the desktops out there now. I see the Windows requirement for the Wii devkit as a weakness, personally ;)

Supporting Windows is a bitch - anyone who says otherwise kneels when Gates or Ballmer walks by. The different graphics drivers in particular bring a lot of problems. See Valve's regular user survey; among each GPU series, there are far more than a couple of different driver versions in use. People only upgrade when they find a problem, and even then, they bitch and moan about the game "being broken".

I have, unfortunately, seen many cases of Torque-based games not running, and no logical explanation existing. One forum I frequent (basically the other forum I bother with ;) has one user who's never been able to run a Torque game. I think he didn't even try with Hinterland. Nobody could ever solve his problem.

Having said that, I think TGB is pretty well-behaved across Microsoft platforms. The worst that could happen is that you need to switch off Aero in Vista, but this problem affects a ridiculous number of games anyway. Those pirated Windows variants aren't really lagging behind with updates, either. OEM copies seem to have zero protection. The last Windows laptop I bought had a Vista sticker with a serial, but at no point did the installer DVD ask for the code.

Portals: What Deborah said, and let me add that you can use a service like eSellerate, where you integrate an SDK and just set a price, they take a percentage, and the game has a built-in trial version.

With TGB, it's ridiculously easy to support the Mac version, and not too many days of work to get it to the iPhone/iPod touch. If it runs on a Mac mini, it runs on anything. If it runs on an iPhone, it runs on any iPod touch even better.

#8 @Ronny: Sorry, didn't mean to imply that Macs aren't a viable market. The "99.9%" was meant to be a remark on who people are targeting, a remark on a developer's perception. Others see the Mac as the big opportunity, with less developers but in a growing space, and they might assign a 99.9% target market there. :)

#9 @Conor - I think it comes down to the fact that most developers have a Windows PC on their desks. While it's true that TGB for Windows can produce Mac binaries, one still needs to have access to a Mac to test them and verify that they run and work properly. One would have to be certifiably insane to ship a completely untested product!

#10 I sometimes think most major game companies are certifiably insane. Look at multiplayer support in damn near everything from GPG and Relic ;)

#11 @Sherman - I do realize that, however if he's just made an iPhone game doesn't that mean he has access to a Mac? I thought that was one of the requirements for iTGB... or am I wrong about that? Anyhow, whatever his reasons may be, I'm sure he has them.

#12 @Collin - You're right, building for the iPhone requires a Mac, so his most recent release means he has access to a Mac - now. But as Deborah pointed out, the PC-only games were Conor's first three releases. He may have not yet been assimilated into the collective when he made those. :-)

#13 @ Ronny - thanks for the reply ! That gives me an idea of what I can expect. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I want to wait until I can sink enough $$$ into a Mac Mini + iTouch and keep my sanity. I am still quite shell-shocked from my last foray into tech support... but we all must start somewhere. Hell, if I can sell enough Windows games to buy a Mac toolchain, I will likely not release any more Windows games at all, lol...

@ Deborah - Thanks again for your time. By the way, are cross-platform licenses available for TGB ? Say, Mac/Win ?

#14 TGB is available for you to use on both Windows and Mac OS X :)

(P.S.:It's iPod touch you're looking for. Looking for an iTouch may net you the keyboard with that name ;)

I think you can pick up a previous generation Mac mini for scraps, and that will be quite enough for iPhone development. The changes in the new one are a better GPU (with shaders), tiny HD upgrades, one more USB port and a different CPU. Actual use for TGB isn't terribly different. Even some 3D shooters crawl at 15-20fps ;)

Also look for a used 1st gen iPod touch if you'd like to test on the slowest device you can cheaply. Although I think this won't be a problem for long, as sales of newer hardware have exploded since xmas. You'll always have customers with fast devices.