Thoughts on Blender Game Engine

You might think, I spent so much time learning how to create this game, it’s only just that if you want to create a game in blender’s game engine you’ll have to learn everything from scratch like I did. You can think that, but that’s not how good games are ever made.

:)…you really made me smile.
I have several years of experience creating “serious games” in various multi-million companies as game designer,team leader,3d modeler, animator,particle artist,UI artist and UX engineer through the years and made 3 pet project games in Blender game engine in my spare time(1-2 hours per day).
What exactly make you think I don’t understand the process of creating a “serious game”!?
However, my advice is - just try harder and learn the basics of programming, then do some simple games in whatever engine you think is good enough.Do not wait for ready-to-use assets.
As sdfgeoff said:

Either generalize, and go and make flappy bird, minecraft etc. or specialize and go into industry in a big company

I assume if you are here, more or less you want to generalize, you could not do this without learning to program.

What exactly make you think I don’t understand the process of creating a “serious game”!?

When I saw your game I judged it on looks, if you’ve worked in big games you’ll know there are many people who could create better models, animations etc. Not trying to insult you I just brought up your game as an example, not many could create what you created but if they for example would be allowed to mod your game the game would end up looking much better. There’s great talent out there, the reason blender games don’t look good, don’t have any interesting stories or why there hardly are any blender games at all is because those talented people aren’t going to spend years learning how to program their game.

Either generalize, and go and make flappy bird, minecraft etc. or specialize and go into industry in a big company
I assume if you are here, more or less you want to generalize, you could not do this without learning to program.

I’m not a game maker, I don’t create the stuff I create because I want to create some game, I do it because I see the value in the thing itself. That said it would be cool to see a model run around and do stuff in a game or in any other medium, that is why I’m at this forum at all. Because I like thinking about it, but I’m never going to be motivated enough to sit down for hours and learn how to create a health bar or all the other stuff that you see in games.

The last time I visited this forum was months ago, I’m not a regular visitor, I jump in every now and then to lecture programmers on the benefits of game kits. Surely you must be able to see how it would benefit animators, sculptors and other artists to have game presets to modify. You would see a lot of better looking games with cutscenes, interesting characters, HUDS etc.

The blender game engine is more or less dead, nobody is using it except 50 or so people on this forum. To make “amateurs” interested in it you’ll have to make it easy to use, it will never be an alternative to unreal, unity or other such game engines but at least people will be using it. Right now it’s only used by programmers, if there are any artists creating games with it do correct me because I’m not seeing it. I made another thread yesterday about advanced cameras, even just camera presets would be useful.

Just pointing out the obvious guys, hopefully when they redesign the logic bricks they’ll always have this at the back of their mind. Because if the basic features won’t be there after it’s redesigned, the game engine will never be taken seriously by artists, only by programmers who enjoy creating things from scratch that often end up looking…not too pretty. :wink:

whats the point of this post… someone coming to say blender is not good enough?

Dude if you want to make a AAA game! Go for it, but if you expect to achive that by using store asets and scripts… youre going to fail badly.

Al people in profesional game industri are multitasking, they know how to do all, may be they are not as acomplish as the one leading the team, but you have to know all, and that is for all industries, you can not desing a car without knowing of engines, tires, hp, etc etc. you can not be doing all over again until the ping pong between team members fit, its a bad bad BAD BAD BAD WORKFLOW.

For sake of speaking all major studios have their own game engines, and some use some of the free ones such a unity or ue, but they have power the shit up of those engines internaly and the point that they actually are not using unity or ue per say.

Another thing, if you really want to get into the industry and you go to a job interview and say “Thats not my problem, im an artists, thats the programers problem, i dont do programing, i dont intend to even try to understand that” you will not get the job, you have to be proficient in all areas and exceptional in your primary one. Go se some game devs videos or those videos that are like “A afternoon in Valve” and you will see that the team leaders, art directors all coment that they were trainees in EA or other companies and they have to work with anyone how needed them, if it was a concept artists there you go, if it was a programar, there you go, if it was a animator, there yo go.

You can not intend to make a game, wich you have not even try to explain about what it is, and say that the only way is kid user friendly software and that you are only going to make art, who are going to do the rest?

I think the bge is capable of more each day (upbge) and the new upgrades to BPplayer seem like they will open up streaming of preprocessed game data*

right now when you press p, or libload an item it has to convert from blender data to game engine data, and this cost can be removed with block file streaming,

Geometry instancing and soft particles open up many new possibilities…
refraction, and cube mapped reflections… exciting times.

with the new reinstance physics mesh, and mathutils kdtree and a little math I was able to generate terrain using mathutils.noise using a seed!

now if I can store a world and then stream it at 60 fps on low end modern hardware… everyone will have to give the bge respect.

Leinadien
What’s the point of coming in an engine’s forum, insulting it and trying to get away with it? If you did this in a UE4 of Unity forum, they would certainly ban you.
The Blender Game Engine is NOT dead. The UPBGE team is active to develop it. We do it because we really like it.

Currently you can achieve results like this in BGE:




And I didn’t even have to program a single line of code.

One does not simply judge a book by its cover, you might think an artist can’t produce good looks with BGE just because they don’t see obvious/explicit/dumbly-named buttons on the screen, but it is possible if you learn how to do it the right way. With a bit of color theory, lighting tricks, good textures, right material tweaking, and voilà! You have a nice scene.

Obviously I wasn’t talking about graphics.

As an artists too, i know what you mean. You want to import some plugin like TPS. You want to model and texture, and animate. Then to just plug some char controller, then some pre-made, ready enemy ai and press the play button “make my game button”. Well in the forum there are resources for that, only that you still need to know some python programming.

Have you heard of a game called Stardrive? I believe I read somewhere that it was created using Blender; It also seems so as all data for weapons and stuff is written into notepad docs. Though Stardrive is a very laggy example, as it tends to render all 10k ships in the game at one time after 15-30 minutes of play. I can’t say for the sequel, as the First was so boring that I just lost interest in even considering the second one.

Actually, no, Stardrive is driven by the “Sunburn Engine.” –> http://stardrive.wikia.com/wiki/StarDrive

Overall I think Unity is the best game engine that you should use since you can also easily port your game in WebGL and distribute it to a lot of browser-based gaming websites such as Newgrounds or Kongregate. If Newgrounds and/or Kongregate decides to support Blend4Web in their platform, then the BGE would be more than enough for you.