Tag Archives: torchlight

Games OGRE OS X

Monsieur, you are really spoiling us

May 13, 2010 – 10:16 am

Yesterday saw a triple-whammy of sugary Apple gaming goodness:

  1. Steam for Mac was released, meaning all the games you own on Steam that are ported to the Mac can also be played there, free.
  2. Torchlight was a day-1 release on the service, meaning Ogre (and therefore code written by me) was among the very first on the service.
  3. Portal became free (for Mac and PC)

Wow. A great day for Mac gaming. I noticed that World Of Goo was up on day 1 too, and since I’d bought it on Steam I could play it right away on my MBP too. Yummy.

Curiously, considering it’s based on Ogre, I don’t actually own Torchlight on Steam – I had a free Windows-only copy from Runic, I bought a physical (Windows-only) copy for my shelf, and I bought copies for both my wife and Diablo-obsessed brother in law on Steam but I never got a copy there myself, so I haven’t tried it on the Mac yet. I need to ask my wife to log in on the MBP so I can try it! :)

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Comedy OGRE

Ogre in Stolen Pixels comics

January 29, 2010 – 6:28 pm

I love it when shots from Ogre just show up in funny places. This time, it’s from a comic strip called Stolen Pixels on the Escapist, where Ogre-powered games Torchlight and Zombie Driver have been used for comedic purposes:

zombiedriver1 torchlightcomic

Thanks to BuschnicK for the heads-up on the Torchlight one, I was surprised to see Zombie Driver just days earlier too!

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Comedy Games OGRE

Punc’d

January 14, 2010 – 11:07 am

Zero Punctuation reviewed Torchlight yesterday!

Of course he was both inaccurate (you don’t have to keep clicking at all, you can hold the button down) and overly harsh, but still very funny. It’s odd to enjoy watching something you had a hand in (albeit in a background technology way in my case) being ripped to shreds, but when it’s done in such an amusing way somehow it’s ok. I guess this is why Yahtzee hasn’t had his teeth kicked in by disgruntled game developers yet :D

As Runic’s Twitter said: “We’ve arrived!”.

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Games OGRE Personal

Penny Arcade on Torchlight

November 5, 2009 – 12:24 pm

Penny Arcade tends to divide a room much like Marmite, but I like both. I was pleased this morning, therefore, to see Torchlight, a game deep within which little gears of my own construction are happily spinning away, featured as the news and comic of the day, and in a very positive fashion.

PA-torchlight
(image copyright Mike Krahulik & Jerry Holkins, click for full-size from original source)

Needless to say the Runic guys are rather happy about this too, no doubt not only because it’s very cool, but also in a more sober sense that you can’t buy this kind of publicity. Their tweet summed it up: “/dieshappy”. :)

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Games OGRE

Torchlight launches today!

October 27, 2009 – 11:52 am

Woohoo, torchlight-1-year-stompTorchlight, the new ARPG by Runic Games and using OGRE for rendering, is launching today! Well, strictly speaking the single player game launches today, with an MMO version planned for 2010. Torchlight has been developed in Seattle by a veteran team composed of the designers and leads of projects like Diablo, Diablo II, Mythos, and Fate, so you knew this was going to be good.

Well, Runic were kind enough to send me an advance copy which I played a little yesterday, and boy, is it polished. You can really tell the heritage of this team, it’s immediately fun to play and has really great production values with tons of neat little touches and is something of a visual treat, which considering it was designed to work on low-end hardware too (it has an explicit ‘netbook mode’ for goodness sakes) is no mean feat. A level editor is coming out very soon too – the very same one that Runic used to create all the levels in the game – so that will be a lot of fun to play with too I’m sure.

Obviously we’re very proud that OGRE has been a part of creating this title. Torchlight is available to purchase in about 10 minutes time according to the countown clock, as a digital download from Perfect World, Steam, Direct2Drive and other partners. It’s staggeringly good value, so go get it!

[edit]In case you need more convincing, here’s a nice video review / overview:

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OGRE

Torchlight at PAX

September 12, 2009 – 3:54 pm

Hell yes. It’s nice to come back from holiday to more eye-candy from leading OGRE-based projects, and this one is looking very nice indeed. Congrats to Travis and the rest of the team at Runic, on the PAX ’09 coverage and also the recent Gamasutra article which I read on my phone at breakfast one day while on holiday (much to my wife’s annoyance :? ).

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Games OGRE

Runic Games using Ogre for new game ‘Torchlight’

April 24, 2009 – 8:37 pm

I’d been tipped off about this possibility a while ago, but couldn’t say anything until now – Runic Games are now OGRE users and have been beavering away on their new game ‘Torchlight’, announced this week:

In case you didn’t know already, Runic formed from the ashes of Flagship Studios, and includes members of the team that worked on Diablo and Diablo 2; games which I personally enjoyed but which my brother in law almost worshipped – he still plays the second one now. Torchlight is along the same kind of lines as I understand it, except that it will come in two forms – a single player game later this year, and an MMORPG in future years, and is being published by Chinese online publisher Perfect World.

Congrats to Runic on their reveal this week, and we wish them the best of luck with the game – it’s already looking great. We’re also very happy that such a veteran team is enjoying using OGRE, enough to put one in only their second public screenshot ;)

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