Why use Torque as a game engine?

As I said in my previous blog entry I've been teaching a game development class using the Torque Game Engine. There were a number of factors that lead to the choice of Torque.

The early meetings with the curriculum board lead to the adoption of Unreal as the engine of choice. As the fall arrived and I had been spending months working with Unreal, reality began to sink in. Since this was a programming class there would have to be more to it than just level editing. While Unreal script is programming I also wanted to be able to have the students understand the actual C code behind the engine. Without access to the engine source this would mostly be a level editing class. The Computer Science department wanted to make sure this was more of a programming class than a level editing class.

In general, there are always C code tweaks to an engine to make any game so anything short of source code would not be a realistic environment for the students. Workable, but not realistic.

When the department attempted to license the Unreal engine it was out of the budget. Rumor had it that it was in the 100s of thousands which was way outside the budget for an edu setting! Another factor was the majority of the official documentation for Unreal requires that same license. While there is a lot of independent documentation on Unreal and this may not be a problem it was a factor in our decision.

Torque had come up in earlier discussions and a review showed it was actually perfect for the educational setting. At around $100 a seat, it included the source. That decision was made in December and I've spent the past few months trying to stay ahead of the students while I learned the ins and outs of Torque. Stressfull, but I think the results I am seeing from the students are amazing.

Torque Game Engine

This semester I've been teaching a class on game development at Chapman University. The class website is http://www.gamedev360.com/. It is the biggest reason I have not blogged in a while. Secondary was my last post on procrastination which sort of helped me see blogging as a distraction. We are using the Torque Game Engine for the class and so far I am impressed. There are some things I really like about it and some things I don't and I'll come up with some posts along those lines in the future.

My previous gig was called GameWorld.com developing mobile games. During that time I was teaching some other classes (Assembly Language, Computer Architecture) and lobbied the head of the department to teach a game development class. After five years, that finally came through last year and I taught the first class. Last summer the department created a curriculum board of industry professionals to come up with a minor and certificate program. This semester is the first class as part of the minor. Very exciting.

The website for the current class is http://www.gamedev360.com/. Please feel free to comment or contact me about Torque. I'll be writing more about Torque and game development in the future.