I'll warn you now, Static and I (well, mostly I ) investigate using Torque to write a new game ( I should probably get my ass back on trillian so we can pursue that more...) and we found torque to be a clusterfuck of "HOLY FUCK NO" complexity due to it being sooooo heavily script based. Tracking client vs server behaviour as well through those scripts was nasty. It was interesting simply finding the entry from UI into the game script itself (of the demo programs in the sdk). Of course I never went hunting for tuts. I did read the docs though.
If you guys do go to torque, I am sure you will be able to produce something of quality, but there will be serious growing pains.
I'll try your game when it hits. I didn't exaclty mean a topological map view to the game, but more a scene connection rules list since you couldn't enter some places till puzzles were solved in briar rose. I guess that could be handled by a minigame enabling a goto ( omfg I hate typing goto).
One of my many ideas atm is planning an Windowing object system as a plugin to any game I make. I almost wrote it in q4 for WFR but that woulda been painful and non portable.
my goal is that I could build this for menuing, but for these style games, it could be active the whole game to provide for the lower or upper screen inventory/status panes these games have and also just a little more flex to the window object shape limitations and you got your clickable areas handled.
I quit wow again, so here's hoping I can piece together a base engine for these games. I am VERY VERY interested in seeing if I can get one to market. I guess I should also probably write a game story so it's actually interesting to play....
yes long post too.. what can I say, gamedev is worth typing about.