I am pretty sure a lot of you remember the game “I Will Escape” that was developed using the BGE. The video below is from Jim Sterling. Well, this is what has become of that game unfortunately:
What can be done about this? Should this be a lesson for future game developers to not be overly ambitious? I am sorry if I may sound a little condemning, but really I did not know that they released the game in its current state.
That is why I kept going, restarting, etc.
when you find sytems are buggy, you have to learn and try again.
one thing you have to do is test, and learn for a while in any engine,
before you build a game,
and then test the hell out of it at each step when you add a new thing,
So that is two high profile BGE projects that have gotten rather negative press on Steam just this year (the other is Silicone 2).
Unfortunately, when you take into account the issues that the BGE has had over the years, this may be an actual case where you can in part blame the engine (unlike games made in Unity and other established and even new engines).
It just shows that the BGE is ill-suited to make even moderately ambitious games and keep a nice coat of polish on it (as opposed to platformers and arcade games), and this only strengthens the argument that it should be recycled into an interactive tool for artists with publishing abilities (which may or may not get more game-centric features as time goes on).
Oh, and the comments about it looking like a PS1 game, this is actually close to the limit for the BGE and the devs. don’t really have the resources nor the time to really push it to the next level (and the BGE will need a metric ton of development over the next year if it’s to ever have a chance to be saved, otherwise it will just fall further and further behind until it’s as functionally obsolete as the Doom engine).
many people have issues with not understanding things like double execution,
and using sensors to add objects to handle events,
and using logic based timers etc,
if you try and run pure python, it it’s usually a bad design.
logic + python + oop= total control
sensors will work better every time for handeling timing and preventing double execution.
How do you know that this guy wasn’t knowing what he was doing during the creation of his game and that his skills are far inferior to yours? I’ve read the making of article on Blendernation and his systems were anything but simple.
For instance, you’ve rewritten your game systems how many times now and we still see the same simple prototype demos and walking mech videos without much in the way of polished gameplay. In this case, it can actually shatter the claim that the BGE affords great ease-of-use because it’s actually a bit easier to wind up with a bad quality game than many other existing indie engines (so it’s more burden on the user to make sure everything works).
The thing is, despite the BGE seeing a number of bugfixes for this release cycle, the tracker for the engine is still quite long and it’s still not to the point where everything ‘just works’ (an attribute expected for a good quality engine, at least for the parts that are used by a massive chunk of users).
I did not say inferior, I said more time.
design -> Test - > Keep or reject
and wrectified has been a learning experience for sure,
I fully agree that the Blender Game Engine should just be reintegrated into an “interactive mode” for Blender artists. Unity 5 I think is the current standard for indie game development. The BGE would never be able to reach that level of polish in my honest opinion. Currently I only use the BGE for prototyping. Also I think the main reason for many games that were being made with the BGE ending up being unfinished is because of the immense learning curve, lack of knowledge in SDLC, and just being discouraged by the many imperfections that the engine has compared to many other game engines.
I plan on releasing documented assets…
I already have released many proof of concepts,
now I am going forward, I have recently, changed my art,
but only the actors, the rest of the system have been slightly rethought,
I really just wanted a more cartoony dark retro atmosphere, and I was not digging the way character art was headed.(my own alterations of the shadeless rig)
and this generation is a mix of all the concepts I have had , its upper body is a rigid body, compound root for carrying… the lower section is a cube with a cone that parents on frame 0 compound, but long story short, its all really well thought out now,
this Wrectifed Cheebe represents the middle ground between all my ideas.
It is not a walking ragdoll, but its not a cube either, it is something different.
It will be dark, cute, fun, and easy to control.
Also on that, the recent failed attempts to create a full-size high quality game with the BGE will only bolster those who say the BGE is just a bad engine (why, because of how a couple of the only large games ever made with it were seen as low quality). With the claim of the BGE having great ease-of-use busted and the claim of the only limit being the user on shaky ground, there is literally just one thing left that the BGE can claim as an advantage and that is the integration with Blender.
I was tired of watching my games get new bugs with each new release despite that area of code not even being touched by the BGE devs, so I moved to Godot and so far I have liked what I’ve seen (much less need for workarounds). I think the development the BGE saw in the last year could be seen as a nice start towards reviving it (but only if it’s followed by a much higher rate of development that includes large-scale refactoring and the beginning of a platform for adding features starting from the basics like hardcoded particles). At least now there’s a chance that a game such as the one in the thread won’t implode when opened in a new release, but the engine needs far more than that if you want a large number of incoming users.
i have seen works during the last bgmc that looked much better, so this isnt the max you can get out of the bge
I have seen better looking BGE games, this is a good game but clearly a lot of bugs than can be fixed.
Jim is known mostly for its squirty plays and making fun of most indie games that comes out on Steam, so it is not something special…
“I will Escape” is one of many under that category. Not to mention that all 93446567 other games on that category are made in Unity.
So lets not cry and make something from this. Actually in the review, Jim mostly complains about the unpolished gameplay and “unusual” crouching animations. The “slender” bug was just at the end and was something that he turned into an ending conclusion, only because it was great for that purpose.
I don’t think his review is somehow connected to BGE, in fact it is very wrong to try to make connection between the game and the engine, it’s like blaming the pencil for the artists skills.
“I will escape” could of been great game, but it needed much more polishing and missing many basic gameplay mechanics, that are common for that type of games. Unfortunately the team was pushed to the corner and forced to release it too early.
Should this be a lesson for future game developers to not be overly ambitious?
Actually IWE made almost 2k sales on Steam according to steamspy, which is not bad at all given most indie games there hardly reaches 500.
Games takes lots of time even months to be polished and mainly those polishing works are to find bugs and fix them or fix issues with game play mechanics.
Yo Frankie is another old great game made in blender but this game also needed few time to be polished and fix bugs like the edge holding glitch,being able to get stuck inside the platform ,animation glitches ecc… apart from that everything about the game was great.
yup the bge has some issues itself but if you rush and don’t polish your work no matter engine the results will always end up having a game that has too many game braking bugs.
As far as I understand most game engines usually specialize on making one type of game. In blender almost any type of game is imaginable although it takes a lot of effort for a user to make it work and it’ll often be quite buggy or run bad. Take a group of people making a rts game, they’re usually using an editor in which to make maps. Everything that has to be setup by hand in blender they’ve already got setup for them. Same with almost any engine, so most of the work that an artist has to do by hand in the blender engine other engines handle automatically with some help from programmers.
I’m looking forward to the logic brick upgrade, hopefully it’ll make things faster to setup. Maybe they could concentrate on adding more genre specific features to the bricks like they did with the rpg maker programs. Built in stuff.
This is why we need templates,
95% of the stuff is easy to do in the bge after you have some time with it,
however the little tricks are not always apparent.
We need some pre fabs for new users to study, with detailed explanations as to why they are
setup the way they are.
BluePrintRandom, I hope that you’re working on them. I may make some game-experiencable graphics templates(nodes) for people to learn how nodes works and how to do things in real time that a lot of people think that is only for rendering. What I see now is that I have become a fan of nodes and I want to make material nodes actual thing in Blender and possibly replace standard material shader because I see potentional in them and the power which they can provide if you know how to use them. A good example is my PBR node or some awesome things made by Binary like parallax, the new ripple demo(which unfourtunately isn’t aviable for us yet) and many other examples…
But about you, BluePrintRandom, if you can provide us some effecient templates, we would be happy. Why templates are meant:
They are hard to make and take time, but after you have them, it is so easy and fast to develop because they allow you to make multiple thigns with single setup by just putting inputs etc.
[My Opinion]
I’m willing to contribute my enormous library of various tutorials - mostly .blend files. The library is about 1GB of practically everything you can think of about creating games in Blender. This is how I learn Blender and this is what I use to create “Krum”. However…there is a catch 
- everything is for Blender 2.49b or lower, but the basics are the same…if you want to learn/examine the examples you will need to either convert it to blender 2.7x or just install blender 2.49b.
One of most important things in it, is the “documentation” folder, it contains 18 full books about game creation:
“A Theory Of Fun In Game Design”
“Beginning Game Level Design”
“Character Development and Storytelling for Games”
“Digital Storytelling”
“Game Architecture and Design”
“Ultimate Game Design Building Game Worlds”
…and many more.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that the BGE can’t make a good quality game, but the fact of the matter is that the BGE has usually been ill-suited for rather complex systems due to engine bugs and the relative lack of assistance tools in the text editor (so you don’t know what errors to fix until you play the game over and over).
Many other engines make use of environments with auto-complete, error checking, and other tools. This alone can cut down on the number of bugs that make it into the release version of a game. Also as I mentioned, the BGE has historically been known to throw bugs (in the engine) at you when you go beyond basic concepts (and even now you can look at the tracker and see how far the BGE still has to go to get to where you no longer need workarounds).
As a Steam user I can confirm this.
This, this is just heartbreaking for the Blender Game Engine.
poeple dont make bad games in unity, unreal, godot, etc…?