Hello,
Introduction
The plan is a pretty simple game that I am using to teach myself more aspects of blender game programming. It would be a good opportunity if your main goal is to learn certain aspects of blender in a collaborative way, sharing your strengths while getting help from others where you get stuck. Game elements will be added depending on what you want to learn.
I was a physics engine coder for two years and shipped three titles, and am fairly comfortable with modifying blender c++ code and writing python scripts. My weakness is in the modeling and “making things look pretty” field. This game project will likely last about 2 months, at the end of which we will “ship” the game to all our friends. (Note that having shipped game experience is the most important part of getting hired at a game company).
Platform
May 2012. PC game. I have blender 2.63 installed on windows7 and Ubuntu.
Game Concept
Kenny Dorham’s Backyard is a real place in Austin Texas, live music capital of the USA. We need to make a concept sketch of the community garden/ sustainable technology park for presentation to the city. Our main challenge is all the permits required to do a pretty simple, positive thing. So the superVillan of the game is an old lady permit officer who comes around and gives you tickets for not having permits for all the fun things you want to do at Kenny Dorham’s Backyard.
Select to play the game as one of three characters.
-Hippie with a flower cannon. Can shoot seeds or saplings of flowers, edibles or trees
Permit Lady gets you for not having a permit for flower cannon. We will use the new sapling addon and scripting to grow flowers and trees when the cannon is aimed at the right terrain.
-Conceptual artist installing sculptures (sample installations - bird feeder, fountain)
Bylaw violation will be specific to art piece (eg failure to apply for a scupture-of-a -horse permit). This would be good for someone with artistic abilities who wants to learn more about scripting, game logic and artificial intelligence.
-Dragon. Can fly and breathe fire. What other magical dragon abilities should we have? Busted by permit lady for not having a fire permit. My plan is to borrow a nice dragon model and add the flying and special camera controllers.
Gameplay
Exploration: You can explore the elements of blender depending on the character.
Hippie will have exploration play related to environment modeling
Conceptual artist will have exploration play related to gameplay, scripting, logic
Dragon will have exporation play related to camera techniques and particle systems (fire) and developing flying and fire breathing skills.
Combat: The permit lady will write tickets on sticky-notes and throw them at the characters ninja-star style. If the ticket sticks to you, the park is closed.
Hippie girl can defend with flower cannon flack and matrix-like slow motion dodging of permits. She can win by finding the correct giant stack of paperwork needed to get a permit application for her gardening and landscaping projects. Permit lady dissolves into dust like the wicked witch of the west if permit application is filed correctly.
Conceptual artist can buy time by distracting permit lady with his conceptual art. The more interesting the piece, the more time he gets to find a way to alter the gameplay, scripting, logic elements to eliminate the master villan.
Dragon can defend with expert flying and strong wind breath. Dragon can win by learning breath control techniques that allow it to aim its firebreath in a fine stream so as to scorch the permit pad in Permit Lady’s hands without igniting Kenny Dorham’s Backyard or singing Permit Ladys hair. Permit lady turns into giant Balrog and kills dragon like a flea if her hair gets singed.
Current Status
I used google earth to get a satellite view of the yard. I then deformed a mesh to emulate the apmitheatre bowl shape and added a live music stage. The texture of the ground is blurry and will be replaced by photos bit by bit, but the satellite view does give a good “grid” to work with. I’ve had a few professional photographers take pictures of the yard, the trees, the fences etc. Textures and materials is my particular weak point in blender though.
More photos here
I have created a .blend file with the mesh and a few trees generated from the sapling addon. There is also a player “cube” with a follow camera attached.
Next Steps
mine
-ray casting so that the player can stick to the ground as the ground plane is not flat
-jump feature
-scripting of flower cannon
-elementary scripting of Permit Lady
-dragon fire
-music and sound effects
-add splash screen for selecting player and explaining keyboard/mouse control
-create a website with file sharing, releases, screenshots and trailers
yours
-working towards a photo-realistic rendering of the backyard
- applying tree and leaf textures
- making a better ground texture
- modeling the flower cannon
-working on some nice, quick concept art to be used to promote the game
-adding sky, sun, clouds, fences, bordering buildings
-creating a few basic conceptual art pieces that noobies could modify in gameplay
-advanced scripting of Permit Lady
-partner with me on one of “mine” next steps
-adding game features according to blender elements you want to learn about
What i can offer is the ability to peek under the hood in blender code to help artists better understand the capabilities and limitations of blender and write scripts and code to help artists’ workflows and create new blender features and gameplay elements.
For example, I recently recorded a few video tutorials to help an artist from this forum who was having problems with a physics simulation.
More Info
I will attach the blend file to this post and also put it online in a temporary location at … ok, can’t get the file to upload here or elsewhere. Maybe 6 Mb too big? Will fix tonight.
Gameplay: Move using the arrow keys. Rotate using < and > keys ("," and “.”)
Download the .blend file
update nov 2011,KennyGame2 added jumping (spacebar)
Download the GameFolder shift select all and click Download Selected
Contact: kesten [email protected]