Many people know that Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that has grown over the years to become one of the most powerful tools for 3D.
What many people may not know is that Blender includes a game creation kit. You don't need to program to create games with Blender, just this book and some time playing with the CD that comes included with it.
To create games, you just need to build your 3D objects with Blender, and then use the game engine of Blender to make your 3D game. This is done by clicks and pull-down menus, with no coding at all.
The Blender Gamekit is a book published by "No starch press" and written by several authors. When you have the book in your hands, you can see the neat design of the cover and the quality of impression. It has lots of illustrations and reading it is like following a series of tutorials, where you see what you must do in every step.
The way you should read it is just like you follow a tutorial: from the beginning to the end, following all the steps. That way you will soon be creating games with Blender. Of course, you can always go to Blender forums and wikis, to widen your knowledge.
The CD contains lots of examples that are referenced in the book, and also the game "Yo Frankie!", a huge project of game based on the Blender game kit. You can copy all these games to your hard drive and alter them to learn how to do games, and create games based on them.
The games in the CD are playable. Pay special attention to "Yo Frankie!" that was developed since 2008 by many people from the Blender community. In chapter 12, the book explains how many effects of this game are done, including things like dual-player split screen, physics, animations, and all kind of things that will show you how Blender has a real gaming engine.
On chapter 9 the book even tells you the basics on doing network games, multiuser games with Blender and Python. This needs some code but the author of this chapter tells you how it works and what you must do, being the only part in the book that shows code.
Other interesting chapter are, for example, chapter 10, where you are told how to create bones and animate your 3D meshes, and 11, where you can see that with Blender you can not only create arcade games but also intelligence games in 3D like the memory game that illustrates this chapter.
Chapter 13 is a reference to the Blender Game Engine, containing things like multi-texture materials, GLSL shaders, sensors for time, keyboard, mouse... This chapter is very extensive. You will appreciate it once you have mastered all the previous chapters.
You can get the book at the editor's site, or in Amazon (that may offer some discounts like now they're doing).
"The Blender GameKit" is the book for you if you want to go beyond modeling and turn yourself or your team into game developers at no cost.
http://nostarch.com/blender_gamekit.htm
© by Jordi R. Cardona. Link to this post without copying the text.
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3 comments
i'm new to blender, and thought most of this is done by code i havent't even learned. it's great to hear i can still make games woith out using one line of code/
P.S. this is a ten year old
Yes the book has lots of examples that you can indeed hack to make yours, and if you make the examples of the book you end making great games.
If you start doing these things at that age, you can reach a very high level on game industry. You must be very clever!
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