William Willing

This post is part of series on my experience with the book The Blender GameKit. For more information, see the first post.

The introduction section of The Blender GameKit has three chapters: a quickstart, a theoretical introduction to 3D, and an overview of Blender’s interface. There are no instructions on installing Blender, but on my Windows machine, the installation process was standard and completely painless, so none are really necessary.

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Today, I received a review copy of the book The Blender GameKit, 2nd edition. I’m always keen to learn new skills and since I know nothing about Blender, this book could prove to be very interesting. For those of you who don’t know, Blender is a free, open source 3D content creation suite. The Blender GameKit is a game creator and engine and is an integrated part of Blender.

Unfortunately, it might take me quite some time before I’ve used the book enough to write a fair review about it, so I decided to do things somewhat differently. Over the course of the coming days/weeks, I will be blogging about my experience with The Blender GameKit while I work my way through it. If you don’t want to wait for that, you can order your own copy of the book at the Blender Store.

Let’s start with some first impressions.

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Today I received an e-mail from the Xbox LIVE Team, telling me - amongst other things - that Xbox LIVE Community Games will henceforth be known as Xbox LIVE Indie Games. I don’t actually get any Community/Indie Games on my Xbox, as my region doesn’t seem to have that feature, but let’s not dwell on that.

I believe Microsoft is doing serious indie game developers a disservice with this name change. A lot of the Community Games are poor quality games, developed by lowly skilled hobbyist. That’s not really a problem, as far as I’m concerned. However, by changing the name from Community Games to Indie Games, gamers will soon associate the term indie game with poor quality and that’s bad news.

Serious indie game developers are not just trying to make cool games, they are trying to run a business, and in business, audience perception counts. When gamers start to think that indie games are mostly bad, it will hurt the entire indie game market.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition has been released to Xbox Live and of course, I’ve bought and played it. I was actually quite impressed with how well it is designed (something I was less knowledgable of, fifteen years ago). I decided to take some notes on the design of the game, which I have published on my Casual Game Design blog.

An item in Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities reminded me of a puzzle I once amused myself with during a boring physics class. I wanted to create a puzzle for the school paper where you have a 4×4 grid filled with letters and you have to use the knight’s move to visit all squares in the right order so you get a sixteen-letter word.

After I picked the word, I tried to fill all squares, but soon I suspected that what I wanted wasn’t possible; I couldn’t find a way to reach all sixteen squares using a knight’s move (one square horizontal or vertical and one diagonal) without passing any square twice. Now I had a new puzzle: prove that this is impossible.

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