Starting a game project? Read this first!

(The original thread may be found here)

Blender is a great application for all kinds of 3D artwork, be that stills, animations or even… games! Most of these projects are solo, but once in a while someone or a team of people decides/decide to recruit people to the development team or just want to let us know he/they is/are making a game.
If you are working on a game and would like to recruit or just show your project in development, please take the following into account:

  1. At BlenderArtists, we frequently get overly excited newbies who post about their project to create a MMORPG (or any other type of game, really, but MMOGs are the most common). In 99% of the cases, the project never goes anywhere and the actual announcement itself would make any professional representative cringe. That’s the reason why we are quick to be skeptical about any posted project which does not follow the following guidelines.

  2. As mentioned before, make sure you represent yourself in a professional way. Provide us with details on you/your team/your company including current team members and their responsibilities, your website (if you have one; most games only have a website once their game is about to be published) and contact information.

  3. Present your game in a good way. That is to say, show us the game concept (including concept art, a plot concept and a game script concept) and the work in progress (models, screen shots, videos showing the game in action) which you already have. Even if you are recruiting, you must be able to prove that your game is not the dream of an overly-excited newbie, so show us more than a dream. Give us a plan.

  4. Give us a reason to be interested in your game and/or participating in the creation of it. Tell us what your game is about, and what it’s major features will be. Tell us who your audience is and what your plans are for when the game nears the end of it’s production. Using which medium will the game be transported to the client? Will the game be free to play or will you charge a single/monthly fee to play? Tell us about your goals in general. Make us anticipate the finished version of the game.

  5. If you are recruiting, tell us what’s in it for us. Many people ask for others to join their project, but why should we? We will not make your game, at least not for free.

  6. Please use proper grammar, spelling, syntax and punctuation. There is nothing worse than presenting yourself by misspelling a word in every other sentence.

I hope this post will avoid any future flames caused by an inexperienced person beginning a game project he can’t handle (yet) and will allow the professional game developers to gain acceptance and support.

Thanks go to lukus for pointing out several excessive demands on my part in this thread.

Yours truly,

Peter Charlesworth

Mods, please sticky this thread.

1 Like

Aye! That is agreed!
(Yeah I know I did it myself… well sorta…)

Nice Charles, i vote for a sticky also.

STICKY PLEASE!
Nice to see you here pete
All NEW USERS!, If you doubt this advice, then dont post in these forums.

Youll just be shunned…

Very Well Said Charlsworth.

This has my vote for a sticky.

I added this to the blender wiki page. I edited it a little to fit the wiki. not much.

http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_the_Game_Engine/The_Format_of_the_Tutorial

This way the information will be there for all. I think instead of making a new wiki with all of this VALUALBE information, I figure add it into the game engine wiki that is already there. I will try my best to add in all this good advice and information as I can. I will credit the writer of course :slight_smile:

I appreciate the positive feedback. I really do :slight_smile:
Let’s hope we can avoid annoyance in the community and the embarrassment of new faces through this thread (and it’s twin brother, in the Off-topic).

free_ality, just doing the community a favor :wink: By the way, you’re calling me the way my English teacher used to :stuck_out_tongue:

Good idea to add it to the wiki, Enriqolonius! It feels good to know when you’ve made an appreciated contribution.

If anyone of you feels there is something missing in the guide above, or that I have made a mistake of whichever kind, please let me know and I’ll rectify it.

Cheers :cool:

Np buddy! I got it all linked up and set. I hope to add more to it, so it can be a very powerful tool.

ha, my bad 'Peter Charlesworth(the 10th)"
:stuck_out_tongue:

I agree with the sticky too. This sort of explanation is exactly what we need. That way if someone is using bad manners we can just post a link to this and move on.

Yes! Praise the sticky god…

1 Like

Actually, praise Roel (aka Goofster) :wink:
I asked him if he could make a sticky out of this and he, appreciative of my initiative as he was, stickified this thread. At least until he writes a summary of this in the forum guide, which can be anytime soon.

Blender won’t carry through my graphics when I make an exe file.
It won’t do alpha so I can’t make invisible Objects and plus it only uses uv
textures. I can’t do any other form of texturing. Plus shadows don’t work.
Also if I try to do any animations they are massive. I did a simple one of a cube moving from
one end of the screen to the other. It was 800mb big. If I do it with less frames then it
will look jerky.
Please answer all my questions. Often on forums people tend to answer only one or two.
I know this isn’t the right place to be posting this but all the other places are giving me
problems, it tells me to log on when I am already logged on.

I have never heard of such a problem but:

  1. Blender doesnt support shadows in games.
  2. You can use blender materials, but the textures are only good if UVed
  3. AS for the animations, Im assuming your talking about rendering(game engine is never that huge) I could just be your video compression. If your using, say, AVI raw, that would mean a hug video file.
    If you are talking about the GE, thats never happened to me, not even with walk animations of rigged characters.

Peace(maybe just start a thread with your questions next time :slight_smile: )
Drew

Agreed! It’s very true… And yes I am a noob and yes I wan’t to make a game someday but I can see with my blender experience it’s just not possible to make a game or the game models even if the coding will be done by other people…
A tip to everybody who want’s to create a game some day: Just practice a lot!

Why do everyone want to make a RPG or MMORPG?
Why do they don-t make a crazy game like Serious Sam?

Ya i agree. especially that lots of newbee’s (including myself…I guess.) Start with a project and never get anywhere(in my case i start with a project and get really slow progress.) I guess my only advice is to actually “Know how blender works” and “How to make a game” before starting a project. Just see “LOTS” of tutorials and post threads here. I’m pretty sure you will get help here.(If your answer is clear that is.) “It’s not a race” doesn’t matter how long it takes you until you start making a game. “The longer” you use blender “the better” your at it.
I agree I saw 1000… newbees(or pro’s) making mmorpg or Rpg games.Why, I don’t get it.
Sorry with the " every time.

But noobs shouldn’t be shunned straight away, it’s just better to slow them down and giude them step by step. I think anyone can achieve anything but the full on approach of a noob is what makes them stop in their tracks. Everything seems overwhelming because of their all in one “I know zero about modeling, scripts, but hey, tiny details right…?”. If they are encouraged to take one baby step at a time these fresh unsynical minds could tomorrow produce the next crysis on blender!

maybe crysis was a stretch to far :slight_smile:

1 Like

i liked the sticky and no 3 votes =P

Ya have a point with the guidelines. I already got chewed for a game idea I posted and was asking for opinions and ideas. Well know I know what to do right.