The Aspiring Adventure Game Developers Toolkit

It dawned on me, that while it´s fairly easy to download all the stuff I link to on this blog, some of you might appreciate having everything available in a collected format. I´m going to look into uploading everything on a torrent tracker, and then just update every other month or so. What do you think?

New Release: Blender 2.5 Alpha 0

After a long time in development, the Blender Foundation have deemed Blender 2.5 ready for serious testing. It is, however an alpha, unstable and incomplete. The finished result is slated for late summer next year, but there is already a lot of kewl stuff to play with=)

What´s done so far:

UI makeover - If you´ve come directly from earlier versions of Blender, you might feel a little lost. However it´s all for good, even if it will take some time to get used to. The UI has seen some love to make it more logical, alot of reorganization has been done and a new toolbar (envoked by the key ´T´ in the 3d view), will make sure you have all tools settings close at hand. The basic Blender identity, I´m happy to say, is still preserved, though. Another interesting direction is that the UI is programmable through Python, which opens up alot of possibilities for designing your own UI. Examples of programming your own context-sensitive popups, ala the spacebar-popup in 2.4x has been shown already. It´s far from finished though, and a lot is bound to change. Looking good so far, though.



Customizable keymaps - No more complaints about migrating from Max, Maya etc. No you can make Blender behave pretty much in the same way. Right now, there´s pretty basic support, and changing all the keys you want is a chore (I would like something like what Wings 3d has), but improvements are expected as this is very early work.

Also in this release is a new animations system with the goal to make everything animatable, spline-ik, volume rendering, smoke simulation, particle enhancements, raytrace optimizations and better normalmapping.

For all the changes, and of course a download, go here.

Johnny Blender - extensive Blender character animation tutorial

David Allen War has graciously dedicated a huge amount of time on making this awesome tutorial series for the creation, animation and rendering of a character - Johnny Blender - which touches on several parts of Blenders capabilities. Prepare to spend a lot of time in front of the screen before you finish these:



The rest of the tutorials can be found here.

3D modeling in Wings video tutorials

Keeping on the subject of introductory tutorials for my tools of choice, I found these very basic video tutorials by Adam Eisfeld on the use of Wings 3D. There are only 3 but it´s a good start if you want to get accustomed to Wings UI and workflow and have an otherwise good understanding of working in 3D. As usual, the first part is showcased below. The rest can be found here.



If you want to download these for offline viewing, and are using Firefox, I highly recommend the DownloadHelper plugin for that.

Blender basics video tutorials

Ok, so on to the next set of tutorials. These are brought to you from BlenderUnderground.com and cover the most basic aspects of Blender that you need to know to get going. Apollos takes us through the UI, basic modeling and materials. It's an excellent starting point for learning blender, and the first part can be viewed here:

All tutorials can be viewed, and downloaded for offline viewing from here.

After viewing those you might be confident enough to try a tutorial I made many years ago, when I was learning Blender myself. It´s on the modeling of a human head and can be found here. Don´t ask for the other parts - there aren´t any;-)

How to use AGS video tutorials

While waiting for new major releases, I´m going to lead you to some great sites and tutorials, that will help you, and hopefully me, in mastering game creation.

First out is a series of videotutorials on the use of AGS, created by Densming, and published on Youtube.com to the delight of budding game developers. There are 41 parts, consisting of literally hours of learning material. They start very basic and progress slowly to more advanced topics. If you´re like me and reading a manual makes you fall a sleep, this is a very fun way of learning. The first part is here:

and the rest can be found here!

The Adventure Game Developer´s Tools of Choice

These are the tools I tend to use for game production, and whose developments I will follow in this blog. First I will go through some game engines, then graphical utilities.

• Adventure Game Studio - "allows you to create your own point-and-click adventure games, similar to the early 90's Sierra and Lucasarts adventures. It consists of an easy-to-use development environment, and run-time engine."
  What this means is that you can basically make your own adventure game, akin to Leisure suit Larry, Monkey Island, Day of the tentacle, without having to program a single peace of code! Just supply the artwork, make up an idea for a story, and click away! Of course, if you want to go more advanced you can customize pretty much anything with the help of AGS's powerful script language! And all this is FREE?! Yes, sirree!

• Wintermute - This adventure game engine used to be commercial, but later has been converted to freeware, and the sources are available and GPL even. Even if AGS has been king of the throne for the last couple of years, Wintermute has made great strides - and judging from the games made with it, it´s just as capable, if not more - at the cost of a bit more laboreous workflow. It´s featureset is pretty much the same as AGS. One advantage is that it´s 2.5D, i.e you can import 3D-characters to use in your games. It also seems to work better with scaling and alphas than AGS. The developer is now working on a new engine, fittingly named WME2 (Wintermute Engine 2) which might be full 3D - unfortunately, it might also be commercial, which means that for the most of us, we will have to stick WME 1.9.1, released in january of 2010. But in all honesty, for most of us, it is also enough.

• DAGE - is a quite recent addition to the scene, but already shows much promise. The engine is full 3D, which makes it different from the previous two engines. Featurewise, it´s the least complete, but is being actively developed, with new testreleases coming out frequently. If 3D is your thing, this is the one to keep an eye on over the next year.

• Blender - by far the most powerful free 3d solution available. It´s been in development since the mid 90s, but only as opensource since 2002. It has a dedicated roster of developers, who code new features on their freetime, and has made amazing strides in just the last couple of years. Major features: Robust, fast modeling toolset. Rigging and character animation. Some of the best UV-mapping available. Raytracing, Subsurface scattering. Particles, Hair, Cloth, Softbody and Hardbody physics, Fluids, Smoke. Built-in compositor and capable game-engine. Scriptable features through Python, exporters and importers for a wide variety of 3d formats. And the best part? Development seems to be accelerating faster each year. If the UI is daunting, rest assured that this is being addressed in the monumental 2.5-series which will be wrapped up mid-2010. Having tried the development versions, I can say that I will never look back. You can check out a modeling tutorial for Blender I did a couple of years ago by clicking here.

• Wings 3D - is a very powerful subdivision modeller, based upon the old Mirai 3D package, which was the modeller of it´s day. Wings 3d has come alot further though, and is free - so there´s really no reason not to use it.

• The Gimp - Undoubtedly the most powerful free image-editing software. It still has some quirks I´m not comfortable with, but it still deserves to be on the list since most people don´t have access to Adobe Photoshop.

• MyPaint - A paintprogram allowing you to emulate real paintbrushes and pencils a la corel painter. Neat little app, especially with my newly purchased Wacom Bamboo Fun graphics tablet.
  

• GraphicsGale - A 2D pixelpushing program with some advanced features, like layers and animation.

I will update this post as I discover new tools to use, but will at the same time strive to keep the list short. There is no need to mention every applications out there.

What´s in a blog?

Hola amigos!

Pardon the spanish introduction, but I´ve been living in Spain for more than a year now, so it just feels more natural;-) Anyhoo, an introduction of this blog is in order:

I strive to make a comprehensive blog about game developing - with a clear focus on adventure games (no, they´re not dead;-) There is a strong subculture on the internet for the revival of the recently quite stale adventure game genre.

I wish to discuss here useful tools for game creation, including but not limited to game engines. Furthermore you will find links to useful and insightful articles and game previews and reviews. There will be a predominant focus on free software and games, but if I really find it worthwhile, I might sneak in some commercial titles every now and then.

The blog might as well have been named the "aspiring" game developer. I tend to always start project that I never finish, but my hope is that this blog will help adding structure and focus to my own work. Of course, any progress will be published here as it´s made.

So, see you tomorrow for my first real article - a roundup of some interesting tools I find useful.

Until then,

hasta pronto!