I picked up Blender just barely in hopes of getting into Indie Game development and making a game out of a entire novel I recently wrote.
I love art and drawing as well. Modeling is coming to me pretty quickly because of this I believe but my main question is - if I choose to just turn my story into a film is that a better option and more reasonable goal for a lone wolf like myself than making my game?
I feel like making a game in just strictly Blender can become a daunting task. Especially an open-world RpG like the one I would like to make.
If any of you skilled Blender users, one very skilled in the gaming engine and another very skilled in everything else could point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it.
You are in the early stages of learning 3D so I would say take it easy and enjoy the ride you’ve done some modeling but try learning the basics of animation try do some bouncing ball exercises, ball with a tail, walks, runs, jumps etc and put massive projects like a games and movies on the back burner.
Last year I made a simple ball with legs, grabbed another model from Blend Swap and rigged it with rigify if you have never animated then your seriously have no idea how much work it takes to get 1 second of decent animation it’s fun but a ton of work
I don’t want to shoot you down; but I have some advice if you care to read.
I have a degree in Graphic Design, 7 years of experience as a graphic artist on top of that I have 8 years of experience in game development (half of this is in a studio and half as indie dev). I can design, draw, paint, program, model, animate. But despite all this I also have had 3 personal game projects blow up in my face. 2 of which were over shooting or were under designed.
Long story short, you need a very good design and minimum effort for a project to be finished in reasonable time as a “one man team”.
Ex: A good story/idea, a plan for execution and goal, most effortless method/resource to achieve that goal.
Everything else will cause you to fail, even if you have a bare bone team like 3-4 people.
There are other issues like monetary problems, burn out and lack of exposure or feedback, even psychological problems can occur during this process.
My advice, don’t try to make a game by yourself. Specially if you are trying to tell a story. Abstract games are more suited for “one team projects”. You say you want to tell a story so… a game is not an optimal way to achieve this in my opinion.
A medium which full fills “minimum effort” criteria is much better for “story driven” projects. A comic, a movie or an animation is much better medium for this. This is because you can cut corners and the audience is not experiencing an interactive experience. In an interactive experience there are ramifications for a “bad interaction” which can make a project seem as a “bad game”.Anyway stick to simple things and small goals. if you don’t care that it takes 10+ years well then my advice is split your project into very very small chunks and start with a chunk as your goal. Then build on top of that finished chunk… good luck.
No. No. No.
Turn around and forget this.
Well. Advice all taken. And much appreciated. I’ll take it slow and just hone in on getting my models built. Then I think I’ll go for a movie first, it sounds easier for a beginner. Then down the road I can use the same characters for the game.
My only question is this. If I make the movie what can I look forward to as far as turning my world/characters into workable game chars/world?
If you want to make a game I can very heartily recommend ludumdare.com It’s just about to start again at April 21th. It has helped many indie devs get started.
In my subjective opinion, do not use Blender game engine. Just go directly to either Unity3D or Unreal (I’m using Unity3D).
The best way to make a game is just do it. Even if it sucks. Even if it’s completely bare bones. Simply finishing something teaches you a lot.
If you are a complete beginner, simply finishing something like Pong is something you should feel proud of.
Game workflow is much more intense
Make high poly, hand decimate a copy or use retopo tools, bake maps from high poly to low, ensure low poly deforms correctly, rig to animate using IK, bake out animations to FK keyframe.
For a openworld MMO you need networking programing skills, security , database etc, and in general this is not a good place to start making games.
You should be thinking about your first walk cycle for now.
Use whatever you are comfortable with
Some users can make blender game engine do anything they wish.
Any engine that does what you need for your game idea, is the one you choose.
Godot, unity, unreal, panda, upbge, it is all up to you.
(there is also BDX by goran and solarlune, and blend4web and many others)
I very much so plan on programming in Python and also want to keep everything strictly in Blender.
Game and Movie Project wise: I’m more than happy to put years into my vision. Just looking for some good arrows pointing me in the quickest/best direction to learn how to do it.
On another note. And I’m going personal here. How would one make money creating things on and using blender? I legitimately plan on becoming a full time blender freelancer. For example; should I start with making/mastering just models and selling them? Or is there an even better route to making a living using blender? Please do tell.
And again, thank you all for the wonderful feed back, Meb88
I don’t care for MMO. Just open world RpG.
And so instead of going through all that work would it maybe be easier to just make good looking low poly models for my movie that way when I’m ready I can just move everything over to my game?
And just to clarify. By Open World RPG I mean a game with a huge world (think Skyrim or Witcher 3 big) and a elaborate story of my own creations. Plus my own (of course different than those game’s) style of gameplay and mechanics which I’ve already drawn up and thought out.
Of course making it all actually happen in Blender I’m sure will require some Python Scripting + Mastering Blender, especially it’s Game Engine.
If you are planning on using python I would suggest you use Godot instead of BGE. Godot’s GDscript is very similar to python and the engine does have a lot of the stuff Unity has.
About re-using the models, well technically you can do that. Build a hi-poly model for a movie, then later convert it to a low-poly asset. But practically you shouldn’t. The reason for this is, depending on your creative look a movie might require more detailed assets (close up shots or extra parts etc). But in a game you don’t usually need things that detailed (for optimization). So cleaning a model and making it suitable for low-poly use might be exhausting than just starting over from scratch. The 2nd reason why you should avoid this is if you are a new artist you will improve over time, and when you look back work you did couple of years ago might not be up to par with your current abilities. Its always good practice to do assets from scratch for their expected use case.
About low poly asset and low poly movie character (using the same model). Well I would say it depends on your movie and expectations as well as your art style. There are some incredibly talented 3D artists which make models detailed as a CGI movie character but has low polygon count as a AAA engine character asset (around 20k triangles). But that kind of skill is doesn’t happen overnight and they usually spend at least couple of months on it. By the amount of work you need to be doing for a movie or game, spending 3-4 months on a single character is not a good idea.
You know I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen almost your exact same post before. I really wish you guys could go and work at a game dev studio and see what it really takes to make a game.
In other news: they say it takes a thousand hours of doing something before you get past that point where everything you do looks like sh*t.
Advice: Start small and work you way up. Set a goal of making a simple puzzle game first knowing ahead of time that it’s going to suck. Then up the scale a bit. Add more features to the next game and so on.
In the mean time, spend that thousand hours wisely.
The saying is to put in 1O.OOO hours before mastering anything. Which is roughly working full time 5 years with something.
Anyways just start somewhere, it’s like coding, when you think of the whole picture it’s to daunting. But just break it apart to manageable tasks and start somewhere. Sooner or later it will add up to something!
Blender Game Engine was the most fun to work with, since you’re in your 3dcc app. I made a small clone of that wood cutting mobile game but using a controller. It was a combination of game logics (which is very basic, but quite fun) and python. You can just create python actuators that runs scripts.
I later worked with Unity, since I had a colleague that could teach me the basics. That was less fun to work with, very stable though. But C# is not that fun to code if you have coding experience.
Now I am using Unreal Engine, and there’s literally NO reason not to recommend it to anyone starting to make games. You got a node base system for logics which just blows anything I’ve used out of the water. It’s so in-depth it’s almost like coding. In blender Game Engine you have Properties and States, Sensors - Controllers - Actuators. But in Unreal you have nodes for everything, you kinda work like you code, event listeners that executes your nodes.
Besides that if you wanna code, you do it in C++ which is pretty sweet compared to C#.
Also lots of the stuff I had to code from scratch, like a video player, character controller, is built in i UE4. There’s nothing that I wanted that isn’t already there.
Materials are node based, you have a Screen space compositing effects. And a viewport and effects with unparalleled performance. Check it out, it’s free.
It’s documentation is on par with Unity, BGE documentation isn’t that fun to dig around in. Also I don’t like python.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Videos/
If you still wanna stick around with BGE, I can recommend blogs like this http://devlog-martinsh.blogspot.se/ there are some dudes making amazing things with BGE and that new fork of BGE called Armory or something.
Anyway I would recommend stick to blender for a long time, do your videos, you can even do mockups in BGE or as videos. As long as you learn to be fluent in Blender whatever you create will start there.
Good luck! keep on blending!
Amazing feedback. Thank you everybody who contributed. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll go head and shoot for the stars with a opening scene for the movie version. And now that I know the depth of what goes into swapping it into a game I’ll just start making the game version from scratch. I’m excited. Love this community and can’t wait to show you all my progress over the next theee years.
First, going to finish Blender for Dummies and three other beautiful books on the BGE specifically. One book on learning Python and the Cgmasters.net’ DVD series Master It.
Following all of this training and probably in between it I’ll post some of what I can do as I progress.
Again. I would love to begin dipping my toes into making a living doing this. Any good starting points for a hopeful future freelancer?
Crikey, I wish these industries are as easy as you want it 
Speaking from my own experiences, making a movie, one worth its salt will take years. I work freelance in programming and animation and my longest video in the last 25+ years was 21 minutes long, it took 9 months to complete while I worked flat out every day within a company. The storyboard took an additional 3 months and was about 600 A4 sheets of sketches. The quality of the models in the final video was about 50% of what I actually thought I could do too, and I had over 15 years experience using 3DSMax back then. Time was a constant enemy. But that is just me, others have different experiences
What others have said is good advice though. Do not be discouraged by the seeming enormity of your undertaking. Just trying to provide realistic expectations.
I would first plan out what it is that you want to do in micro steps. Flow charts are excellent ways to help you brain storm your goals. You can create a mindmap or flow free at https://www.draw.io/ to help you get started. Even if your starting point is “Learn Blender”
“Learn Blender” has many branches such as modelling techniques for games, modelling techniques for high poly, texturing, sculpting, UV Mapping, painting, material creation, material creation for games, animation, motion capture, post production & compositing. Look at training websites (lots around) that have courses on Blender to give you a kick start.
After “Learn Blender” you might want to create another mindmap for say “Making my movie” with heading branches for storyboard, art style, models to be built, photo’s to take, audio effects to record, music artists to hire, software tools required, where to sell it, how to promote it, find sponsors, find testers, how much will I sell it for etc
It really helps you focus from “I have a great idea on paper” to “what’s actually involved?”
As for an actual game, an MMO too well that would take much longer. There is so much to do. As I say, this is speaking from my own experiences. if you want to be paid for it then I would look at Unreal Engine and Unity3D for PC / Mobile. Unreal Engine is good fun for the non-programmer as their blueprint system is very powerful. Unity also has some third party visual programming state machines like PlayMaker, if you do not want to learn C#.
What about your delivery? Steam Store, App Store, Google Play etc.
In fact I would probably do a vastly cut down mobile iOS version first that would (pray here) generate instant income to hire a team and do a full blown PC/Mac version for Steam. Research MMO games like Rust and Ark Survival Evolved developer blogs to get an idea of what they went through when starting out. Both earning millions in Early Access.
Anyway, hope there is some bits of advice in all that babble
Good luck and keep us posted.
Yes there’s tons of help in all that “babble”. And I appreciate all of it.
One- I’m never going to make a MMO. Ever. Just open world RpG. Single-player. Strictly. Not saying it will be easier. Just saying.
Two- My game can take twenty years or ten. No rush there. My movie, can take time too and will be a huge learning curve.
Now time constraints and realizations aside. What’s my best bet of making Blender my profession quickest?
For example: Make Models and sell them on turbosquid? Do go ahead and make a lot of little games for phones? Or maybe even make tutorials as soon as I’m competent enough to do so. Which would be the quickest route to me turning this into my freelance career?
Tutorials are great when you have more experience of pit falls and can help people out when they mess up. So, starting out I would sell assets.
Find a model on Turbosquid that has little competition. Also, it would be well worth paying a 3DSMax user to convert your .blend or FBX into a native max file (with materials and probably VRay materials too) as that is the most common native file format there.
A little game for iPhone would take a vastly longer time to make than many assets for Blender.
So… .blends never sell or just not nearly as much? I was really hoping to just use blender.
I do not know if blends sell on Turbosquid. I do not sell assets myself anymore. Somebody else?