Hey everyone, I’m the CEO of GarageGames. Since this is my first update, let me start by saying thank you to everyone who is supporting us. We really appreciate it. We’ve had a lot of people tell us that earning money on a free product is hard and they are right.

If you are on the fence, you may be asking yourself, “Why would I support a free product”. We understand why many people would rather wait on the side lines and benefit from the support from others. But that isn’t a sustainable model and we believe that paying developers will always drive better results. We hope that with your help we can support another full time developer in our community. We are building more than technology; we are building an ecosystem…one that may very well someday support you. I’m a great example. Long before I was an employee at GarageGames I was a community member.

So please, if you are on the fence, we ask you to support us.

Now, an update wouldn’t be an update without some eye candy. We are posting a video made by the developers at BeamNG (http://www.beamng.com). If you aren’t familiar with their name, you may recognize their soft body vehicle physics demos posted on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KppTmsNFne).
And you might remember that the soft body video was running in Crytek’s CE3. Well, yesterday, they posted a new video of their vehicle physics running in Torque 3D. They’ve switched to T3D! There’s no doubt in my mind that this wouldn’t be possible if we hadn’t switched Torque 3D to the MIT license.

We believe that developing our tools under and open source environment provides a hands down better experience for us as and our customers. Developing in the public forum has been a great experience for us so far. Please help us…be an early supporter of a new way of making games development possible for everyone.

Just a mini-update to let people know that we are now on the front-page of IndieGoGo! This is thanks to our amazing contributors!

In this update, we talk about fixed funding vs. flexible funding, the great guys at Mode 7 Games who have donated licenses to Frozen Synapse for anyone who contributes $25 or more, our new Consulting perks, and why we chose Ubuntu first.

Remember to leave questions and comments so that we can address them!

Well, we certainly hope that everyone had a great holiday season and are enjoying the start of a new year! Over the break, we tossed around a couple of ideas on how to make our Torque 3D for Linux campaign even better. We took the advice of people here and out and about on the internet and we received a very strong endorsement from Mode 7 Games.

One of the great things about creating game development technology for as long as we have, is that we have some amazing developers who have created absolutely amazing games with our tech. Mode 7 Games is one of those development teams. Their game, Frozen Synapse, won the audience choice award at the Independent Games Festival and the 2011 strategy game of the year from PC Gamer. It is also available on Steam for Linux since their top-notch team did the port themselves.

Paul Taylor had this to say about their company and Torque on Linux:
“Torque has been essential to our success as an indie development studio: its flexibility coupled with its power means that it is the ideal platform for Mode 7.

Through our experience with Humble Bundle and now with Valve’s Steam for Linux, we’ve found that there is a thriving market for indie games on Linux. We would love to get more directly involved with our own Linux versions: Torque for Linux would allow us to do this.

The success of this fundraising drive would make a huge difference to us and a host of other indie developers. We’re happy to provide copies of Frozen Synapse as an incentive for you to support this important project."

They are generously donating copies of Frozen Synapse to anyone who pledges $25 or more to the Torque 3D for Linux campaign.

In other news, we’re opening three new tiers and removing the $10,000 tier.

The first two tiers are an hour of dedicated support with Eric or I (or the appropriate GarageGames employee). We will provide dedicated support on game development problems, Torque-specific issues, business development strategies, real-time optimization techniques, profiling resources, code analysis, or whatever help you really need to finish your game. My tier is $100 and Eric’s is $250.

The next tier that we are adding is $7000 and includes a trip to Vegas, dinner with a number of GarageGames employees, and a five-star hotel stay here. We have to restrict this tier to residents of the US and Canada or the international flight costs would eat up any money that will go to the Linux developers doing the port.