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.

The quickstart is clearly meant to give you some first hand experience with Blender before you have to work your way through the theory. Initially I thought this would be completely superfluous, but I actually rather enjoyed it. You are given a 3D model of a man and the quickstart chapter tells you how to replace the texture of his face. You only learn two or three basic actions, but it gives you a taste of what it is like to work with Blender.

The next chapter introduces the basic concepts behind 3D computer graphics: coordinate systems, polygons, meshes, textures, cameras, stuff like that. This is definitely a chapter to read away from the computer in a comfortable chair, as it is all theory. Since none of this was new to me, I merely skimmed this chapter.

The last chapter of the introduction tells you everything you need to know about the Blender interface. This chapter is certainly useful, but it’s also a bit dull. Blender’s interface is quite different from that of other programs, so you definitely need this information if you haven’t used Blender before. The chapter basically walks you through the most important windows, menus and buttons of the interface. It’s quite a lot of information at once and without a tutorial to give you some hands-on experience, it’s hard to feel confident that you now know the basics of Blender. However, I decided to go on and start with tutorials. I can always refer back to this chapter if I need to.

In short, the introduction is quick and mostly painless, albeit somewhat dull at times. If nothing else, I’m looking forward to the hands-on tutorials, and maybe that was the most important purpose of the introduction all along.

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.

First impressions

The Blender GameKit is a softcover book containing 320 pages, printed in full-color. The layout is very clear and the pages are full of screenshots and tables. It all looks quite inviting. Colored tabs at the bottom of each page make it easy to quickly located sections in the book.

The book is basically divided into three parts: introduction, tutorials and reference. The introduction gives basic information about 3D and about Blender. The seven tutorials are categorized according to difficulty: beginner, intermediate and advanced. The reference material takes up a little over a hundred pages, but I can’t say anything yet about its usefulness.

The accompanying CD contains pretty much what you’d expect. There is a copy of Blender, of course. For every tutorial, you can find source code, assets, intermediate steps, and the final result.

Expectations

After working my way through the book, I expect to be able to create a decent hobby game with the Blender GameKit on my own. I don’t think I can learn the skills necessary to develop a commercial quality game from this book alone, but I should be able to deal with things like rendering, input, sound, game states, and GUI at the end of my journey.

Since I don’t know the first thing about 3D modelling, I’m curious to see whether this will be a problem. The back cover of the book says that “The Blender GameKit includes an extensive section for those new to 3D or to the Blender suite itself”, but the book is subtitled Interactive 3D For Artists, so let’s just wait and see how that turns out. To be honest, it’d be fine with me if my games are made up of textured cubes and cilinders.

Next

Whenever I write something about The Blender GameKit, I’ll add a link to it here. If you have any questions about the book, don’t hesitate to ask.

• First impressions (this post)
• Introduction

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.

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.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the proof I wrote back then anymore. Still, I remember some of the key parts of it and it isn’t that hard to reconstruct. I suggest you have a go at it; it’s quite a nice puzzle.

Ian Stewart asks: what is the longest path possible on a 4×4 grid? The problem I have with that question is not so much finding the answer, but knowing when to stop looking. Obviously, when you find a path that visits fifteen squares, you know that must be the longest (since we already know that sixteen is impossible). However, if you find a path that’s shorter than that, how can you be sure whether you found the longest or not? Of course, you can write a computer program that uses brute force to calculate all paths and then shows you the longest it found, but that feels like cheating.

So I hope Brütal Legend will be a huge success. There’s no doubt in my mind that it will be great, because when was the last time that Tim Schafer made a game that wasn’t totally awesome? Never, that’s when. A few days ago, he responded to questions of fans via Twitter. You can read the entire Q&A if you have some time to kill, but here are some of my favourite quotes.

Q: What kind of rating are you aiming for? T? M? E? Kids to Adults?!
A: Well, I’m not taking out the decapitation, so I’m thinking M. But you never know.

Q: Hey, Tim. How did you get the dialogue speed perfect in Day of the Tentacle?
A: We peeped through your window and watched your lips move!

Q: Give me 7 reasons for why I should play Brütal Legend. Also, will there be demo?
A: Jack. Ozzy. Rob. Lemmy. Lita. Decapitaion. Making-out. Maybe.

Q: This latest idea of yours… Riding up to our shareholder’s meeting with a gang of bikers? Who do you think you’re fooling?
A: The shareholders, sir. It’s good PR to be seen hobnobbing with real Corley Motors customers.

Q: The game is not going to have multiple endings, is it?
A: No, just one ending: You being the happiest game player of all time.

Q: why dont add a multiplayer to Brutal Legend… and make friends play the campaign??? its cool for me if u ask
A: We do have multiplayer, and it’s awesome. I can’t make your friends play with you though.

Q: What does your mind look like? I can’t look into it from here.
A: I tried to look at it just now and it kind of hurt my eyes to look back that far. I think you broke my eyes. Luckily, I am a touch-twitterer.

Q: did jack black have to get into a motion capture suit?
A: http://bit.ly/44aJO

Also, Telltale is giving Monkey Island the episodic treatment, like they did with Sam ‘n Max. I haven’t played their Sam ‘n Max games, because the demo of episode one had technical difficulties on my PC at the time. Hopefully, that’s a thing of the past. The Xbox won’t help there, though, because the new Monkey Island games will only be available on PC and Wii.

If you are using an std::map that has an std::string as a key or value and you get all kinds of error messages from your compiler about template argument deduction or implicit conversions, you probably forgot to include <string>.