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 Big Brains. Select your tank and prepare for battle. |
“We started Marble Blast as a simple game,” says GarageGames director of internal development Mark Frohnmayer, “but we quickly found that we were creating one of the most fun games we have ever played. It is almost Tetris-like in its simple premise, ease of play and infinite replayability.”
Roll Your Way to Success
In Marble Blast, you control a marble as it rolls around a variety of challenging playfields. Power-ups enable it to race at high speeds, jump high, sprout a propeller and more. Your goal is to make it to the finish — or complete a task, such as collecting a certain number of gems — without rolling off the edge of the track.
Flying High. You must master power-ups if you want to succeed in Marble Blast.
You can download a demo of the game and play 5 levels, including the challenging “Hop, Skip, and a Jump,” before committing to the entire game, which offers 72 mazes.
Under the Hood
GarageGames created Marble Blast in conjunction with Monster Studios. They used the Torque Game Engine (TGE), a revolutionary application that allows developers to quickly port their titles to multiple platforms. Many developers build their games with engines — the basic technology that underlies the game — that they license, such as Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2K3) engine.
Such licensing is usually very expensive, though, which means that small companies simply can’t afford the fees. GarageGames, however, sells TGE at a price that even hobbyists can afford and allows every licensee to view the engine’s code base and offer improvements. And developers can use TGE to create everything from puzzle games to first-person shooters.
“In terms of sharing [the code] with other developers,” says GarageGames partner Jay Moore, “that goes back to our core mission. We want to develop and publish games with autonomy, with fun as our core focus and the gamer as our major stakeholder.
“We knew that if we could solve the problems of building independent development teams, equipping them with the technology and assisting them in bringing great games to market, we could birth and sustain the indie game development niche.”
(To learn more about TGE, see “Ratcheting Up the Fun.”)
Score! Hit the mark with your orbz.
Fast-Paced Action, No Blood
Another title that GarageGames helped bring to market is 21-6 Productions’ Orbz, a game in which you fire a colorful orb at a variety of targets and try to score as many points as you can. The solo mode offers a series of challenges in which you try to earn medals that will unlock new challenges as well as new orbs to choose from.
In multi-player mode, you can participate in online contests with other gamers via the Internet or compete against computer-controlled players called “botz.” 21-6 Productions president Justin Mette explains that the botz “adjust their difficulty on the fly based on the skill of the human players they are competing against.”
In the world of online multi-player gaming, many titles offer card, casino and board content, frag-filled first-person shooters, or massive fantasy worlds to explore.
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Orbz, however, fills a void — the game features fast-paced action that requires a certain amount of physical dexterity, but there’s no bloody violence. Of course, the multi-player online mode does allow you to chat with your opponents and even taunt them, thus combining the community experience of card games with the competition you’ll find among first-person shooters.
Great Divide. Orbz offers a variety of interesting environments.
Retro Spirit
Joe Maruschak, creative director at BraveTree Productions, sees another gap that needs to be filled: the one “between the ‘retro’ games that have become popular lately and the massive, million-dollar first-person shooters.”
Direct Hit. Corner your opponent and blast his tank
to bits.
To bridge that gap, he and his small team created ThinkTanks, which he says was built “in the spirit of the original Atari 2600 Combat game.” You get to compete against computer-controlled ‘bots (in single player mode) if there aren’t any live opponents available over the Internet. Each tank offers different abilities and weapon assortments, and there are three basic types of battlegrounds that emphasize different combat styles.
“We didn’t really enjoy downloading the latest FPS and getting stomped in two seconds by the experienced players,” Maruschak explains. “In ThinkTanks, the gameplay is a little slower and a little more calculated, and driving the tanks around the terrain is enjoyable in and of itself.”
Foot Fault
Programmer and artist Doyoon Kim notes, “computer tennis games have been few and far between. The game’s ideal for friends and family to play together,” he adds, “since it doesn’t require any complicated controls to learn.”
Critter Country Club. Tennis Critters offers singles or doubles action.
You control one of several tennis-playing chipmunks in Nerd Riot Games’ Tennis Critters, and you can take on up to three opponents at the same computer or over the Internet.
Tennis Critters, ThinkTanks, Orbz and Marble Blast are just the start of GarageGames’ Mac offerings, thanks to the Torque Game Engine. David Chait, a technical lead at Papyrus Software and a proponent of multi-platform game development, says that he got involved in the project and built the Mac version of the software because “Torque sounded like it had real promise, and that it would benefit the Mac gaming community to have a commercial game engine where the Mac was a given, rather than a port.
“Almost all of the leading development groups are interested in hitting the Mac for release, and that’ll mean great new products for Mac gamers for years to come.”
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