hile casual gaming is a concept that sets many in the so-called hardcore crowd’s teeth on edge, it’s hard to argue that that approach isn’t a successful one. Bolstered by the Wii’s popularity and the success of casual, Web-based games such as Bejeweled, developers and publishers are spending increasing amounts of time—and money—creating accessible gameplay options for people who might not have the time, patience or inclination to play larger games.

GarageGames is entering this arena with a slightly different approach. Rather than simply creating a batch of games, the company is launching a new PC-based platform that will let players chat with friends, create parties and play games within a Web-browser’s window. It seems like a perfect choice for GarageGames, too, combining its game-design experience—its 3D Marble Blast Ultra was one of the first Xbox Live Arcade games on the 360—with its behind-the-scenes work in game development, as developers of the Torque game engine.

During a demo of InstantAction, we got to see a pair of games running. Both 3D Marble Blast Ultra and ThinkTanks looked great, with smooth animation and crisp graphics. It was definitely a case where seeing was believing—they both looked as good as something you might find on Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation Store. It was a bit jarring to realize they were running in a Web browser. InstantAction boasts a slick interface that lets people invite friends into games by clicking on a URL, and people can take their groups and seamlessly hop from game to game.

We recently spoke with GarageGames’ Josh Williams about this new project. Williams has worn several hats within the company since he started four years ago. In that short time, he’s gone from an intern writing documentation to working on engine programming and project management. Now as the company’s chief technology officer and CEO, he’s in a unique position to talk about InstantAction and what it could mean for gamers of all stripes.

GI: Can you talk a little bit about InstantAction?

Williams: What we’re trying to do is a whole bunch of stuff. The gist of it is we’re trying to fuse what’s cool about Web games and what’s cool about more core, higher-end games. Taking the core gameplay and some of the production value and higher-end-looking stuff from core games and making that just as accessible as casual games and browser-based games—the Flash stuff that’s out there. The main reason we want to do that is we see a bunch of not necessarily problems in the industry, but a bunch of stuff we see as opportunities. Just speaking for myself as a gamer—and I talk with tons of people who feel the same way—I still love playing high-end games, and I have a PS3 and an Xbox 360 and a Wii, of course, but I just don’t have time to pour 60 hours into each game I get. I’m too busy, but I still want that experience.

If games were more accessible for me and if I could still get that same sort of action game, higher-end core stuff in small doses or just accessible when I want it, I’d actually play a lot more games than I do. I miss having time to dig into them like I did. I think that for a concept is similar to what Nintendo is doing with the Wii. That was one of the main reasons they wanted to create the games they offer for the Wii—games that are more focused on fun gameplay than glitz, and stuff that’s more accessible and easier to pick up in smaller chunks. Likewise, I think for developers in the industry, we’ve talked to tons of developers, and everybody I talk to says it’s still great to make games and it’s sort of a dream job, but most triple A projects are a grind. You work on a project for years, and you’re a cog in a wheel in a 100-person team and you have little to no creative input unless you’re one of us select few, and those are usually publishing execs and marketing people and stuff. It’s kind of become a grind, whereas it used to be really fun to make games. Lots of developers, too, want to focus on smaller stuff that they can do with smaller teams, like it used to be, back in the day. But there haven’t been many channels that let triple A developers do the sorts of games they like to make and are good at making and like to play and make them successful. Making the game is only half the battle. Once you make the game, how do you get it out there, too? We basically see InstantAction as the answer to that.

GI: How the heck does this thing work?

Williams: Here’s how it works. We’ve been working on this technology for two years, in the background in secret at GarageGames, and we really poured on the juice in the last year since we realized that it really was possible, and we did the R&D to make sure that it was feasible. The way it works, it’s complicated, is that we basically have a plugin that we want to support in all the popular browsers, and the plugin is this tiny—it’s a few hundred kilobytes—and you only have to install it once when you come to InstantAction if you want to play a higher-end game, and then you won’t have to install it ever again. It will be updated from time to time, but you won’t have to do an install for each game or anything. The way the plugin works is really any game that is written to support the InstantAction platform can run in the browser. So this little piece of technology lets you run the browser, render in the browser, and there’s very little performance overhead for being in the browser. And we also help take care of user input and making sure that people can operate their desktop smoothly when they’re in game. Say if you hit escape to go from your browser to a normal Web page or restructure your desktop of whatever if you’re in the middle of an intense action game. So it handles all the input and stuff. We also have a backend API to support all the backend stuff we have—like friends lists, your profile, high-score tracking, stats tracking, seeing which of your friends are in which game and being able to join those friends in game. Chatting in the site, all that sort of stuff, as well as just communication back and forth between a game and the Web page.

It’s similar to—it’s actually exactly the same as—say running the game for a console. When you run a game for a console, you get a development kit and an API. With InstantAction, you get an API to write to, and as long as you support the platform API, you can run in the browser. It doesn’t matter what baseline technology you’re using. We make the Torque engine, but one thing we’re trying to make clear is that you don’t have to use Torque to make InstantAction games. Only about half of the games we have signed up with the InstantAction portfolio right now are using Torque. Any desktop game engine or game technology or even homebrew stuff for people using custom tech can run. As far as a developer making games, it’s the same as making games for a PC desktop platform. You just integrate it with the InstantAction API and you’re good to go.