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  • Blenderguy
    Newbie
    • Dec 2024
    • 12
    #1

    The Blenderguy

    Hi, I'm [----------] this close to finishing my first game in blender, but plan to make a lot more now that I know what I'm doing. I stuck with an outdated version of blender 2.49b so I could focus on learning the software and how to use it rather than hopping to the update-march. boy am I glad I didn't try to spend time relearning the interface. by the time I got a hang of it they'd have removed the game engine entirely lol.

    I've been a nintendo fanboy since I was 6 months old back in 1986. I'm nearly 40, but still act like a n008 sometimes. I use my skills for game dev, and sometimes website design. my website is on neocities and is a work in progress. I have 2 websites there but the other one is... well... "give a troll a free webpage and what did you expect?" = "website poop"

    my first system was the NES, followed by the original gameboy. my favourite game was Metroid, but I played alot of super mario bros. I made a mario 3D model in the old style but didn't rig it yet. Edit: my first favourite cartoons were Super Mario Bros Super Show, Captain N: the game master, and transformers (because what 80's kid wasn't into The Transformers'). I had to learn how to do professional game character rigging and it took months upon months over years to do it manually. I got into zelda in highschool, I mean I did play it back in the 80s but I was too young to enjoy it, I'd just get frustrated over how my little kid fingers didn't have the dexterity to really play it well. but over the years it's grown on me. of course I played other stuff. lately I play City of Heroes from time to time, yes it's a now defunct superhero mmorpg, but meh it has it's moments.

    I watch a lot of anime now days. mostly because when I was a kid my parents were the kind that only watched broadcast TV, we never had cable, so. I've been doing a lot of catching up.

    my current game I'm working on is just a puzzle game. after trying to make all sorts of other games, such as action adventures, platformers, space shooters and such I figured out that all of those game types require things like characters and special effects like fire, smoke, electricity and clouds rain and water. I'm getting an understanding of how to make such things now. I have a better hang on modelling and coding and physics. had to learn a ton over the years. but now I hope to make it a career, my goal with this game is to prove to myself that I CAN do it, and I'm literally like 10 menu buttons from complete with this iteration of the game. it'll be released for free, with kinda a "donate if you like this" message (I used python TKinter.TK to make the donations window in the game, that was a headache to make). game dev headaches are things I just have to deal with.

    I'm on a fresh windows install and just getting all my programs reinstalled and the way I like them. still haven't reinstalled city of heroes.. I'm contemplating a few manual updates to the OS before I install it as it requires .net at some version higher than 4.8 I think.. and I likely wont get back to work on my game till I get everything squared away. I'm considering a better offline backup system than I currently employ. I'm considering an external hardisk, rather than thumbdrives and a second offline computer (that one is like 15 years old lol so.. it might crash before this one, it gave a CMOS battery warning the other day when I powered it on and then the screensaver said the graphics card couldn't handle 3D screensavers (which means something is causing the system to ignore the graphics card, wonderful..). But i'll probably get it all fixed up in a couple weeks.

    I can be a terrible procrastinator, in the past I was a very very legendary procrastinator. which is why I've yet to finish a single game where I've studied game dev for more than 15 years now lol since 2006... but these days I seem to have a drive to do dev, maybe it'se beause my learning curve kicked into high gear and I'm so close to finishing my first game that I feel like "I can do this, I can be a real game developer!"

    anyways I type a lot, this is a short post for me. sometimes I ramble on to the post cap in character limits.

    Edit: I'm a long time lurker on World-of-nintendo.com.
    Tags: None
    • Linko_16
      Who d'you think you are, Bruce Lee?
      • Jun 2002
      • 8974
      #2
      Be sure to let us know when you publish, I'd love to see what you've been working on and give you some support. Consider making a thread in the Gaming section and sharing some of your alpha/beta screenshots.

      I've had a few solid ideas for a game rolling around in my brain for quite sometime, and they still surface now and then as things I think would work REALLY well. But making them happen would require long, hard hours learning game design and development skills that I don't have, and I just don't know that I trust myself to invest the time and come out with anything worthwhile. It's always very cool to hear about someone doing that as a hobby.

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        • Blenderguy
          Newbie
          • Dec 2024
          • 12
          #3
          Originally posted by Linko_16
          Be sure to let us know when you publish, I'd love to see what you've been working on and give you some support. Consider making a thread in the Gaming section and sharing some of your alpha/beta screenshots.

          I've had a few solid ideas for a game rolling around in my brain for quite sometime, and they still surface now and then as things I think would work REALLY well. But making them happen would require long, hard hours learning game design and development skills that I don't have, and I just don't know that I trust myself to invest the time and come out with anything worthwhile. It's always very cool to hear about someone doing that as a hobby.
          Will do!

          and I wouldn't expect someone to put in the time to do game dev from the start, that'd be a huge load of studying and probably interfere with normal life. but if you have questions, do ask. I'm happy to teach game design bit by bit, I suggest starting it as a spare time hobby, spend weeks learning one simple thing really well to some basic level at like an hour or 2 a week.

          back when I started learning game dev I'd put in 16 hour days till my brain melted lol. now I'm back to 16 hour days, but I rarely encounter something that tough to figure out, now those 16 hour days are exciting. another tip is to save test files, where you test how to do some small feature. as you learn you can then just open a file where you already did that, if you forget how to do it. people who shoulder-watched my learning process many times commented from the peanut gallery to say "you say you're learning to make games, but every time I look at your screen it's still the same grey background and the same default grey cube!" and my answer was "yes, I'm testing out player movement, I don't need a graphic for that, the cube works just fine."

          oh, and backup everything, regularly. once you know how to do a bunch of things, then you can try making a game design plan. in my experience I'd try to write out steps of what I wanted to accomplish, then go into detail under each seeing if I could explain exactly how I could accomplish it reasonably. sometimes I could not write it out, and that highlighted something I'd have to test and learn. and above all, if you can't figure things out, search the internet for how other people do it, then see if you can reproduce the same system in your software.

          it is a big learning process, but it can be fun. and everything you do learn is a checkmark off the list of what you need to know. also, don't try to do everything the professionals do off-the-bat lol. leave professionalism for final product phases.

          I'm also an ESL teacher, I teach English to people in China, that's my main paid work atm, but I don't get much. but that's where I get the drive to explain everything to people.

          right now I'm keeping the kinda game a bit secret till I can get out the first revision but here's a screenshot of the hardest part of the menus I had to make; the color input window. I decided that with the actual gameplay finished and functional I should do some professional looking menus and tried to mimic the style of classic windows default games, except I made all the menus fully 3D :P

          Game-screenshot.png
          I blacked out the stuff that might give it away.

          making the sliders work and update the number fields was thousands of lines of code and careful consideration of mesh swap and object placement compared to window scale. then making the number fields typable and able to move and update the sliders was another chore entirely. It was a learning process for dealing with sensitive floats and conversion to and from things like hexadecimal, int and Decimal. python's floats are actually fairly stable, but blender's built-in float properties? they are really bad, so I ended up saving numbers as strings "text" rather than float 0.0. simple things like 0.123 as a blender float might come out as 0.100000000000000000934.
          Last edited by Blenderguy; 12-14-2024, 09:02 PM.

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