People who see me work in 3D animation like things often say “Hey, you should make game apps for phones! sell them for 99 cents and sell thousands of them and it will be awesome” or something along those lines. I usually just kind of smirked but didn’t give it much thought, but i think i’d like to perhaps start thinking about it.
I recall blender making something called Eat Sheep. That was an app for phones right?
(then as a side question i wondered if all this applies to xbox indie games too?)
Is it possible for the average Blender user to create simple games to sell as apps or indie games?
I don’t believe Blender supports games for mobile devices or consoles. I use Unity with Blender for games. Make the assets in Blender and import them into Unity. However while you can get Unity for free, you have to buy licenses to develop games for consoles, which are really expensive. I think you can make mobile games for free though.
And you need to know JavaScript if you’re going to be making any games.
Eat Sheep was made by CGCookie and had its assets modeled in Blender, but it is a Unity Engine game. There has been preliminary work to get Blender (and the game engine) to run on Android, but nothing stable so far.
Let’s just say you need to learn how to program. Unity supports C# (recommended), Boo (Python-like, rarely used) and a Javascript-like language (Unityscript).
Hmm, I suppose i’m fine with learning unity. I’ve certainly heard of it before but i’ve never used the program. might be neat trying to learn a new program like that (:
There’s a game i play sometimes that runs on unity i really like too so that makes me kind of excited to know of an example that uses it.
Javascript and C#…
The idea of “coding” sounds scary to me. I’ve had a webdesign class before where we did html, CSS, and i think there was some slight javascript for like making menus have drop down boxes or something. but it’s all a bit hazy to me.
Well even though it sounds scary, i could still give it a shot. I’d have a ton of fun if i could just get an animated character to walk around when i’m first learning.
Try watching some tutorials on Unity Cookie (http://cgcookie.com/unity/). The first one I went through was the crash course. It’s helpful and free. You can find other ones there (also free) that’ll help you with scripts.
Blender can make assets for the games. Most people use unity nowadays.
Unfortunately blender is not as good as Maya or Max when it comes with playing nice with unity and other engines. I can write a whole google doc on why.
Fortunately it is good enough to fit in such a pipeline - so no need to purchase licenses from autodesk. You just have to spend some more time and effort dealing with the limitations / missing features that make life nicer.
Yeah, go for Unity. Basics are really easy to learn, but quite soon you need code - optimal situation would be artist teaming up with coder. My experience is few days course last year, and it was kinda fun, was even able to do simple game for iPhone. But would not have succeeded without friend who knew how to code.
Wait so is unity free? i heard about it alot lately and it seemed like it was a kind of common thing that was easy for anyone to pick up and use but all i’m seeing is a product to but and a trial.
i mean. I’m not trying to be cheap about it, just truth is i don’t got much money at the moment for programs and stuff s:
Well, there’s a free version and a paid version of Unity. Unity pro is $1,500, and you get a 30 day free trial (but you can’t publish games using pro without purchasing it). The free version works just fine though, and you probably won’t even need the pro features until your more advanced in it. You can publish commercial games with it, but there’s gonna be a splash screen at the beginning saying “Powers by Unity”. There’s no trial for the free version, so you can keep it for as long as you want.
Download it here: http://unity3d.com/unity/download
Make sure you don’t build anything in the pro version trial because you’ll have to pay the $1500 before you can publish it. Skip the free trial until you’re ready to pay.
For your situation, I would recommend learning Python. At least just for now as you might as well know a language before learning Unity and selling games is not quite as easy nor glamorous as your friends make it out to be…
Python is a very useful scripting language and ideal for learning programming. If you want good results in a short time, I recommend “Python programming for the absolute beginner” by Michael Dawson. The exercises are mostly small games, so that should be right up your street.
Once you have a grasp of Python you will have a lot more options open to you. I think you can use it with Unity, but if not you will at least be in a position to advance to another language for which you can.
Unity uses JavaScript, C# and Boo. (I have no idea what Boo is so don’t ask) I don’t think Python has a use in Unity. I’d recommend watching the Unity Cookie tutorials that teach you coding.
You can make blender game tests on your andriod device yes.
There is an Andriod Blenderplayer BGE apk that you can download. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmotQRm7rlA. I use it it’s fun to make little tests with, but it doesn’t support all the features of the PC version
If you are completely new to coding and would like to pick it up I suggest www.codecademy.com. It has courses for both Python and Javascript and is pretty easy on someone new to either the language or coding.