Blender Game Engine: The Choice for Beginners

Some of My Test Files

Games are fun, right? But not every game meets the standards of our fantasy game. So many people have so many great ideas. But not all ideas can be actualized. However, some try even though they have so many restrictions. They want to create something of their own. Today the amount of people trying to actualize their dreams is growing. Indie game studios start popping up left in right, either solo groups or small teams. Even though the rate of people trying to develop games is growing  rapidly, the amount of success is not keeping up with it. 

Now let me tell you about some of the trends of these failing teams before I get into the main subject of this article. (However if you want to skip this part skip to the next bolded section)

Teams that start out in High School or Early College	These teams can be successful don't get me wrong. These teams are usually started by a group of bored friends that have no "real" knowledge of how game creation works. And most do not have the real drive to finish either: learning, planning, or creating.
MMOMakers	A whole bunch of people like the idea of an MMO that fits their needs completely, however they do not understand why no MMO fits anyone's highest needs. MMO's are big. Like Really big. Most teams don't understand how much effort goes into making  these kinds of games. There is a lot more modeling, texturing, and animating that a single player game. Not just the actual physical content is increased, but the programming and server development is the biggest issue. No game comes from gathering a group of people together and telling them to make it based off of their skills. There is a lot of money and effort that goes into R&D (Research and Development). Researching how to do these things is too much for a small group of people. So these people need to get over their pipe dreams.
Full Time workers with varying schedules	Now this kind of team fails frequently by no fault of their own. If no one on the team can meet, then there is no time to discuss and direct each other in order to make it flow well. And there is hardly any time for private work as well.

Okay that’s out of the way, I can breath now.

Learning the Ropes

Now if you have a level head about you and realize that your first project might be crap, or at least not to your expectation, then you might be in good shape. The best way to lean the ropes of game dev is to be working on a project as you research; I think anyway. Now the things that you have to learn straight up is modeling, texturing, and animation; no matter where you go. But one of the main things that will give people a hard time is the programming. Programming is hard to do, probably he hardest for beginners and this is the thing that needs to be entered slowly.

Programming for the Newbie

Diving into learning a programming language will be extremely tough for the newcomer to do. So I suggest working with something that will smooth part of that processes over. There are some games engines that have you really just click a few buttons to make a game. This might be a good idea to do. It really just depends. But so you can get some taste of programming while hitting some buttons, I would say that Blender Game Engine is the best bet.

What is Blender?

Blender was primarily a 3D Modeling and Animation software. However, as time has went on, Blender has become more robust and has expanded it's portfolio. Blender now has nice Video Sequence editing,  3D Camera Tracking, and Motion Tracking, and a stronger game engine.

Learning Logic with Blender  

Logic Bricks

With Blender, a first time experimenter can really learn the ropes of Programming Logic, with out having to worry about language syntax. It uses things called "Logic Bricks" which you open up, choose what type of logic you will be performing, type in the variables you need and pretty much "BLAM" you have created some small feature to your game. Now there are some limitations to the specifics of what you can do, but that can be opened up with a little Python Scripting. (P.S. Python is one of the simplest languages to learn)

That's Not All It Is

Not just is Blender easy for beginning programmers, but it is fantastic for all of it's other features. The UI, to me, is very intuitive and simple (Once you learn the simple hotkeys, which are also very natural) I have tried using a few other 3D programs, but I never decided on them. I was able to get my hands on 3DS Max, (I received it from a Student because I couldn't afford it) and the UI was not very smooth to me. Because 3DS Max was so weird I did not try the Maya that was given to me since it too was made by Autodesk (So I have no real opinion on it). I also was able to beta Test a software coming out soon called "Ray Supreme". I am not allowed to give any details about it until it releases, but I can say that it was not my cup of tea either. I also tried some cheap software programs that didn't work out either. Needless to say, I stuck with Blender.

Solution for Just About Everything 

Animation Workplace

Another thing that makes Blender a perfect gamming solution is that you can run every feature you need in the same window or multiple windows with the same session. You can have UV Mapping, 3D Modeling, Node Editing, Animation Sequence Editing, Python Scripting and ..err… "Logic Bricking," all spread out over you display(s). I use two or sometimes three monitors for my work space. On one I'll have my view port, primarily through the game's camera. On another I will have my animation Sequence Editing coupled with the Logic Bricks and Python Scripts. On my Last screen I will usually have my UV Mapping with Gimp pulled up beside it or a Tutorial. When I work in Blender I usually am able to work very smoothly.

Documentation

Okay, I mentioned a tutorial like two sentences ago so let me tell you something. This I would figure is the most important topic when researching for an software, documentation. The community for Blender is extremely huge. There are several different forums all with almost infinitely amount of topics posted. There are several Blogs dedicated to it. The most exciting documentation to me is the endless video tutorials. Any problem I have ever run into, I have found someone with a solution.

Pricing

Now the final topic, and the one that hurts most staring developers, price. Blender has many high end features. It does not have some of the very complex abilities like some AAA engines, but it is growing, and quickly. A software with extensive documentation, amazing incorporated features, and an amazing community is defiantly worth a fair amount of money. However the value of Blender is much higher than the price asked of it, which is free.

It's Big Problems
Now I know it seems like I have been praising Blender beyond belief, but believe me I am not that big of a fan boy. There are some problems about this engine. The ability to optimally run a very high poly count is not as sufficient as others. Creating an online multiplayer game is not very likely (to my knowledge anyway). And the biggest downfall is the exporting abilities.

Licensing
To fully explain the exporting problems I need to get into the licensing. As I have said before, Blender is free. How is it possible for Blender to be free? Well Blender is an open source software that several people work on for free (some people are out sourced to I believe). And these people believe that there should be a robust solution such as this that is free to all people who need it. So the licensing it was put under is called GPL (General Public License). This license allows several things that people can do: create content for free, sell content created, and even sell the software, and so on. So how does this affect the export?

Exporting Problems

Scripting Workplace

Blender exports one of two ways. You can export as a ".exe" file which is typical, or you can export as a ".blend" file. First lets talk about the ".blend" file. If the game is exported as a ".blend" file then the player needs to have Blender installed so that it can be opened. But you don't want to do that do you? That would be extremely complicated for someone to have to do to play it and it would break down the size of your audience. Well okay then, I can just export as a ".exe" file that should be good right? Wrong! If you export as a ".exe" file then the game is compiled with the Blender Player incorporated. What's wrong with that? Well this goes back to the licensing. All of you material that you create in Blender, on its own, is your content, however, once the Blender Player is incorpor
ated into your file it is instantly placed under GPL because some of the content is Blender's. This means that anybody can take your game or your files, and use it for their personal use or even sell it for their profit.

 Exporting Solutions

However there are a few ways that you can get around these problems. You can do a search for these and you can find them after some work. What these solutions are, are engines that you can import your ".blend" files into, with all your programming and physically created content and it will compile it with out the Blender Player. Some can even export to mobile devices.

 Conclusion

That's about all I have to say on the matter. Summed up, I think Blender is a way for anyone interested in Game Development to get started. Look at it some more and see if it will work for you. And remember, there is no such thing as wasting your time. You need to learn it anyway and you need to go through problems, Blender just seems like the best bet to start out.

Pretty soon I' will post an article about some of the best games I liked that were made with Blender.

Thanks for reading, Bye!

Crazy Tower Defense 3D

Hello all indie and mobile gamers! Boy do I have a nice one for you. Well if you enjoy puzzle or Tower games it is a nice one for you. However, I will say this: I am not a "Tower" fan, and when I was asked to review this game I was a little iffy on how I would like it, but this game really did ignite a flame inside that has the urge to consume this newly enjoyed game genre. By consume, I don't mean like destroy, I mean play a whole bunch of. Don't mistake what I said as something negative…cause it's not!

Crazy Defense was created by a small company named Etorki Games. It consists of three members in the  Basque Country located north of Spain. As one of the members, Pablo, tells me, Crazy Defense is Etorki Games' first game, and was made as a type of "test." This is not a game one would assume is an "armature practice." This feels like a quality game made by professionals, and that is what it precisely is.

Let me get into the review of the game itself.

This game is definitely an old man's acid trip. The story actually starts off that way as well. I wont go into detail with the story, if you want that then you can watch the video review on our channel (I'll have an embedded player at the bottom here).

The Towers:

The Towers of this game really feel like you are in the mind of the drugged out Looney Bin patient. There are three basic towers to choose from, which each have a few upgradeable options. There is the simple box used to retard enemy movement and with some money that can transformed into the towers that you will actually use as you defense: the Venus Fly Trap, the Looney Patient, and the Shooter. The Fly trap will chop on enemies near it, or if upgraded can shoot land enemies with in a certain radius. The crazy man can crash down on the ground, whack at enemies, or fling them back away from their objective. And the Shooter can fire away at those really desperate enemies that decided to use jet packs to fly over the tripped out battle field.

Survival Mode:

You objective in this game is to keep your enemies, which are nurses and doctors, from entering into the room you are hiding out in. You are given twenty lives which drop down every time an enemy slips passed your defenses. You are also given a small amount of money at the beginning of the game so that you my buy a few towers and upgrade them. After your towers kill an enemy, you earn a few more bucks so you may buy more. And after every wave the enemies become more abundant and more difficult. This game mode lasts for over a hundred waves and trying to think of new ways to beat this game mode gives plenty of replay value.

Strategy Mode:

With strategy mode, you are given a few towers that you must arrange within a short time limit. You need to arrange these based on the types of enemies that you will face and what direction they are coming from. You do not get any more towers than what you are given, so you better make sure you made it were those nurses suffer a hideous death at the hand of your hallucinations.

Box Challenge:
This one is very tricky. You do not kill the nurses on this mode. On this mode you have to arrange the towers, which are just simple, non-upgradeable boxes, in a fashion that will change the enemies movement to make them take long enough so that they will not reach the corridor within the time limit. I guess the reason you do not kill them in this mode is because your not high enough to create the different crazy towers. So you just keep them away for long enough so that you can get doped up for another round.

Pac-Dan:

Have you ever played Plants verses Zombies, well I have and I loved it. Now a mode that I enjoyed greatly was when the roles were reversed and you played as the zombies. However there was never enough levels for that mode. Well Pac-Dan mode is where the roles are reversed just like what I was talking about with Plants verses Zombies . However, in this mode there are plenty of levels to enjoy, and they are a nicely complex and simple, and difficult enough to keep you busy for a while.

And what I mean by reversed is you are actually playing as the old man and you try to go around collecting your pills while running from the staff.

Now here is my overall rating for the game:

The control scheme was pretty straight forward, a little frustrating at times trying to move towers.

(4 out of 5)

The art style was nice and detailed for an Android game, but also very cute.

(5)

There was a fair amount of content to this. A fair amount of levels. It will defiantly keep you entertained longer than angry birds.

(4)

Game Play, Majority of the puzzles were great, but for some of them, the difficulty level didn’t seem to match the level on which you unlocked it.

(3)

And the price of this is free, which makes any game better when you don’t have to pay for it. But just for kicks, I would say I would pay 2 to 5 bucks for it, seeing as how it is an android game.

(5)

Overall = 4.3/5

So download this game for sure and give it a go! If you liked this review then subscribe to this blog and out YouTube channel. There is a link below here for the video Review of this game. Thank you for reading and goodbye.

Survival Ball and Rockbyte Softwares - Indie Game Reviews

Hello All Indie Gamers. Well, more Like “Poor, Hipster, Cheap A** People that play these games in order to be a part of that underground community of Douche bags so they can play games 'That No one has ever heard of before.’”  Yeah I can’t stand you!

But maybe some of you actually appreciate the underdog. They make you feel proud to be low on the corporate food chain of Game Development. Many of you that play Indie games probably appreciate them so much because you are in the same exact boat. Well, today I am going to talk about an Underdog and his work. This is about RockByteSoftware.

RockByteSoftware has three titles under its belt right now. AlarmZen, the first one, WikiQuiz, and Survival Ball, which we did a video review on.  As told in the video review “RockByteSoftware is a hearty little team of One.” At the beginning of January of 2012 RockByte launched with its first finished project called “Alarm Zen.” 

- "How long did it take you to make that app?"
- "A couple of days?"

Oh yeah, the founder’s name is also Pedro. Now when I was talking with him I was going to ask him the question “How long did it take you to make that App?” and hope for the reply, “A couple of days.” You see what I did there? I made a Napoleon Dynamite reference…oh come on its funny. But I decided not to because I figured that it probably took longer…and that I would have been a little racist

Alarm Zen is a very nice android alarm application that’s designed to…well…wake you up. But there is more to it than that I swear! Okay let me explain it like this. When we sleep our mind goes through different stages.

- Those beach whores aren't going
to seem so pretty are they?

After about one and a half hours, we fall into a deep sleep, and shortly after that we achieve a stage of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and then it fluctuates back and forth for a while. During our REM sleep stages is when we dream and thus forth closer to consciousness, so in this time frame waking up will be more pleasant. I know you may think the opposite of this because you are having the best, most amazing, dream ever with motorcycles and volleyball girls and steak! But say you just did a closing shift at work and you now have to do the opening shift right after, those beach whores aren’t going to seem so pretty are they.

You can choose a time based off of a sleep stage chart.

With this app you can just simply type in the time you want to wake up or you can actually look at a chart of sleep patterns and find an optimal time to wake up. What even adds to this madness is that this app can detect the energy levels of you music in your library and use it to slowly put you to sleep and to smoothly wake you up.

So that pretty much covers the basis of that. Now to talk about Pedro’s first android game which is… dun…dun..dun… WikiQuiz. Now I’m sure you can guess what it’s about. So let us talk about its variety and functionality. On the Google Play description, Pedro claims that ten questions are added every day. I’m not really going to doubt it. I haven’t run across a redone question but once.

The questions are all very interesting. Someone made a comment on the Google Play Store taking about the answer choices, “The answer choices don’t make sense, only one of the answers even seems logical.” It was at least something along those lines. What I would say in response to that is “Well, if you know the answer to the question, then it makes sense that only one of them would make sense.”  But I am way too Internet shy to go off and start a fight on the Google Play Store, so I kept the thought to myself.

Now when playing this I started to ponder my interests and saw how I should be learning more sophisticated and relevant things. If I can answer these questions:

Who wrote the episode Hide and Q in Star Trek the Next Gen?

What Native American chief learned to smoke cigars, and use eating utensils while living in Denver with White people?

But don’t know something important like “Who, in 1903 was the general superintendent of education for the Philippine islands and was instrumental in the total reorganization of the educational system.”  Then I’m pretty messed up. (Answer is David Prescott Barrows)

After you answer a question, right or wrong, two new buttons show up at the bottom. One is to continue to the next question, and the other is a link to the Wikipedia page about the person or event or whatever proper noun you are being quizzed about.

So this man David Prescott Whatshisname intrigued me. So I poke at my unresponsive touch screen that my cheap phone has, and after a few tries I am now able to take a gander at who this man is.

I found out this man was an archeologist, an explorer, and an educator. Every summer he would spend studying culture with the “American Indians.”  I know a lot of people say that Wiki has a ton of their stuff wrong, but I disagree. I’ve learned everything that I know from almost only Wikipeda. There are no such things as those so called “Native Americans.” White people were here first and then those people from India came over here to take our land. But we sure did show them who the boss is around here.

I know I’ve never qualified for a college scholarship, or made very high scores on my ACTs, but I know that I’m well educated. Everyone at my 8.00/hr job at the Yogurt Place and my girlfriend lets me know that I am. Although my intelligence may be up for debate, we are going to move on.

His next project was Survival Ball. Now if you watched the video then you then the gist of what’s there, but I’ll have a little more here.

In Survival Ball you’re a sad little ball living on a very sad and apocalyptic platform governed by an invisible God that loves to make your life as short and miserable as possible. 

You try to stay alive on the platform that you are set upon while enemies, or maybe their considered obstacles, or maybe…Dang It…their trying to kill you. Either by pushing you of the side, blowing you of the side, bouncing you off the side, or knocking the floor off.

The game is continuous. The “levels” increase as the timer rolls on and as you survive the waves of enemies. The platform never heals and it only gets more aggravating. If you don’t like aggravating then you can make it kind of frightening. If you get the “Theophany Majora’s Mask Music Remake” and play it in the background with some headphones on, you actually can feel the eeriness of the malevolent forces that govern your life.

Like in the video review, this game is for android and for the PC. Now on the PC there is a local Two-Player-Mode if you have two controllers or just a controller and a keyboard.

Now in case I haven’t instilled into your head that there is a video review and that you should watch it, go now! There a girl that actually plays video games reviewing it. So go!

But before you do! (If I haven’t already lost you)  I want to add something to the end of this; a conclusion if you will. Making games is hard. But the process is very intriguing. Things may start out one way and turn into something else even better. A team may have never even though to make a certain project but they did. A person may have never even dreamed of getting into a certain hobby, but they flourish in it now.

Now I want to interpret something I attained from Pedro’s Spanish Bible:

Yo no hablo españoles

“I started to grow curious, to dig deeper in an area of expertise that I was very fond of: gaming.”

“I started the RockByte Software with the AlarmZen app, one year ago, in order to have a "brand" that could house some posterior titles/apps. I made it that way because you never know who might join you for the journey, but for now, the team is just me.”

“Survival Ball was never meant to be in the first place, it was result of many fortunate experiences…. After doing a (YouTube) tutorial on physics, I placed a ball on top of a surface, and wondered what I could do to make it move with a gamepad.”

Sometimes we can’t just jump into our biggest dream, we need to slowly build up to it. Having a portfolio will help attract someone to work with you on something, maybe even your big something. And the last thing, if an idea comes from nowhere and it seems like it will work, try to at least pursue that as well. So that’s all I have. All those apps are worth a play/test. Remember to stay Indie!

Okay, Bye.