V12 in beta
Garage Games talk about their indie game engine, based on Tribes 2
A year ago this week former Dynamix employees Rick Overman, Tim Gift and Jeff Tunnell formed a new company called Garage Games, which would be offering a special version of the Tribes 2 engine dubbed V12 to independent game developers for just $100. Although things have been fairly quiet since then, work on the V12 engine has been progressing on both PC and Mac, with a second beta version distributed to testers recently.
"It's amazing, there really isn't a game right now; it's just a test app. But you just start up a server, get a list and jump in with a bunch of guys running around, and it's a lot of fun", according to Tim Gift. "It is going to be pretty easy to take that and throw in some gameplay mechanics and have a game. I think we'll have games out in the first couple of months. Stuff that's fun to play, [but] maybe not something you'd necessarily want to charge money for."
Creating a commercial product is going to take somewhat longer though. "I think what people are don't realize yet is that any game takes a bit of work. Even just putting all of the art together takes months of work if you're going to do a serious, large game. There's the art, some shell work to do, game logic they have to put in there. So I think serious products are going to be a year away."
In the meantime it looks like the first release of the V12 engine to licensees may be just around the proverbial corner. To find out more about the engine and the electronic distribution system Garage Games are planning for games built using it, check the Garage Games website.