Experimenting with the Blender Game Engine

For the past couple of months I've been wanting to create a short horror experience. I've messed with Unreal Engine and Unity. I've been wrestling with myself for quite some time as to what game engine to use. I think with Blender it's SO nice and convenient to be able to build everything in one location. It's kind of tedious having to package everything up, import into another engine, organize everything, assign textures, and then set your scene. Unity and Unreal are amazing game engines, but I'd LOVE to see Blender's game engine developed to a level that is much more competitive to these more well known engines. A girl can dream right? Maybe it's just me, but having everything in one place is SO wonderful. Plus, free/open source definitely makes this girl's heart flutter. I think for me, I'm so familiar/comfortable with Blender's interface and functions that having the convenience of everything in one place is too good to pass up. Blender's game engine utilizes logic bricks that are similar to Unreal's blueprint editor. Of course it's not as fancy and sophisticated, but again, I hope it'll get there.

All that being said, I decided to experiment with the Blender Game Engine a little. If you know your way around Blender, it isn't difficult to set up. Shown in the video below, I was able to set up a basic scene with colliders, lighting, skybox, and environment foliage. It probably took me about 2-3 hrs (Granted, I already created my theater model). I would still define this as very rough. I'd like to go back over this and add smaller plants, rubbish collected at the front of the building, etc. I decided to call this short scene 'Gloomy Sunday'. I have an idea and short story behind it that I'd like to develop into a more concrete game.

WHAT I USED TO SET UP THE SCENE

Note: I love Blender add-ons and use them frequently to streamline my processes.

• I used Mirage to create a quickly generated landscape
• I downloaded free foliage and forest assets from Blend Swap
• I used a model of the Princess Theater I created from scratch myself
• I used Asset Sketcher to VERY quickly paint assets onto my landscape
• I used Easy Game to add a simple snowy particle effect and first person camera to the scene (LOVE THIS APP! Easy pre-built settings like first person camera, day/night cycles, simple particle effects, and more!)
• Recorded my screen and pieced together clips in Final Cut Pro

If you are interested in more Blender Add-ons, check out my past blog post 'My Top 5 Favorite Free and Paid Blender Addons'

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