How to Make an Advanced Menu for your Blender Game

Game Engine Game Engine Resources
#1

Part 1:

In this video, I will be teaching you how to make an advanced game menu for your Blender game. In this part 1 of the series, I will be going over the process to make the base UI including buttons

Files mentioned in the video

Part 2:

In this video, I will be teaching you how to make an advanced game menu for your Blender game. In this part 2 of the series, I will be going over the process to make the background and the settings sub-menu that will read and write data from and to a file. Settings created in this video: Screen resolution and brightness. Next video, player name and audio on/off settings.

Files mentioned in the video

Part 3:

In this video, I will be teaching you how to make an advanced game menu for your Blender game. In this part 3 of the series, I will be going over the process to make the audio on/off button and a text field where a player can enter their user name.

Files mentioned in the video

Part 4:

In this video, I will be teaching you how to make an advanced game menu for your Blender game. In this part 4 of the series, I will be going over the process to make the leaderboard sub-menu system

Files mentioned in the video

Enjoy :slight_smile:

1 Like
#2

Part 2 is out!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3OOiXG1wQ

#3

Really cool tutorial!

#4

Part 3 is out!:

#5

Part 4 is out!:

#6

man this is so helping thank you for having time to do this, this is just what wee needed ,:slight_smile:

#7

I’m glad I could help

#8

yeah it is really helpful ,

#9

Nice tutorial, it gave me some new ideas. :slight_smile:
I noticed that in your 2nd video, the settings.py saved the settings.dat file in the same folder as your Blend. But in my tests, it didn’t. It saved it somewhere else. C:/Users/Mark/recent I think, among others. Any ideas why? Is that important?

#10

I’m not sure but perhaps that happened because it is a recent file? I can’t really help you with that.

#11

Thank you for this. How do I link “campaign” or “new game” to actually gameplay . Do I use separate blender file for actual gameplay/ levels ?

#12

use an other scene. top menu, there it is, you can append assets from different blend files to make your map.

#13

In the logic for the buttons, there is a scene actuator. Set that to the scene of the level or switch it out for a game actuator and start another blend.

#14

That’s really cool,specially the use of dropbox. To send the scores you use email, is there any other possible way so they could be automatically uploaded to someplace and from there could then be downloaded to display, without manual interference?

#15

Awesome . Blender seems like a good alternative to the 3D engines. I’m using Gamemaker for now, but might switch to python scripting/ Blender for 3D as opposed to Unity/ Unreal Engine. GoDOT seems promising too.

For Blender I like how I can model, rig, paint, build levels, script, composite ALL in one package. The only downfall is that the engine itself/ or the Blender player seems kind of sluggish or not well optimized. I’ve noticed this with several demo’s, but maybe its because they weren’t scripted well? For instance, I played “After Midnight” (excellent by the way) and it ran pretty good as opposed to some of the other Blender game demos I’ve played.

Also, are developers using Blender engine for indie game development on XBONE/PS4/ Windows10, WiiU, NX, 3DS, Linux, and OSX? It seems the other alternative engines are better optimized for supporting those platforms. For instance, Unity all you have to do is click a button to port the game to the desired platform.

I hope Blender puts more emphasis on the game engine within the next Blender release. It certainly has potential and seems a bit underrated.

#16

you can go to the steam store, see artic alive, krum, tomato jones, such games were made with the bge.

#17

Most modern game engines use deferred rendering and static draw call batching and other advanced techniques,

However in the mailing list, it looks like the new render will be able to support all these features, and UPBGE is also adding advanced rendering tricks to lower cost per instance.

They are talking about a Forward+ rendering pipeline with PBR, in the discussion about the viewport.

#18

Also, are developers using Blender engine for indie game development on XBONE/PS4/

No, can’t use Blender for this. You need a license from Sony/Microsoft to make a game with Xbox or PS3/4. In Unity and unreal, if you show them the license, they will unlock that part of the game engine, Of course it’s not easy to get a license.

Do I use separate blender file for actual gameplay/ levels ?

You can use a separate Blend file if you want. You would have to add a game actuator. You can carry data from one blend to the other using the globaldict (save/load) or use Nicolas_A “settings. Dat” script, you would have to add the data to the script. This would save the data to a text file, then the next blend file would read that data from the text file. So you could carry heath, ammo, magic etc. from one blend file to the next.

I re-named the script to “Inventory.txt” there are too many “settings.dat” in windows, and it makes it hard to find. :slight_smile:

Anyway . . . Thanks again Nicolas_A :slight_smile:

#19

That is what my website will do once I actually publish it. I will create another video on that later.