Cargo has won 2nd prize in the 2010 Blender Game Competition! There were a lot of great entries this year – seeing the list of games certainly put the fear in me. The winner was so good that they actually won all of the categories, and they had to make new ones to allow a 2nd place. Well done, Lucy and the Time Machine!
Behold, Cargo makes his first public appearance!
You’ll need Blender 2.49b to run the game. After downloading and installing Blender, you can start the game by double-clicking on Dungeon.blend or running blender Dungeon.blend. More information is available in our old and trusted companion README.txt.
Edit: The game has been tested on GNU/Linux and Windows. In theory it should work on Mac as well.
Cargo in the water churn room.
I have been working non-stop for the last few weeks getting Cargo ready for submission to the Blender game competition. It was a sprint to the finish line but now it is finally submitted! Having a deadline to work towards has really helped me to prioritise and determine the features that are most important. Friends testing the game was a huge help, too – thanks guys!
The submission can be viewed on the Bullet wiki.
And now I can sleep.
Screenshot of the first minigame level
I’ve been working on the epic* adventure game Cargo for almost two years now. It’s starting to reach a point where I can slot the pieces together to make levels. And just in time, too! I aim to enter in the Blender Game Competition 2010, and the deadline is the end of February. So far I have made one level for it (screenshot above). It is basic but fun, and it shows off the scripts and physics fairly well. Now I need to polish up some of the graphics, add a menu screen, and hopefully some more levels. Full steam ahead!
* ;)
I finally added grass to Cargo. It took a long time to do!
I have been wanting to do this for ages. The island looked quite bare without it, but I knew that it would be a hard task to render the blades in real time. A couple of tests showed that the blades could be rendered if they were all part of one big object, but as individual objects it was too slow. Individual objects is what I need though: it’s the only way to have each blade react when touched.
I ended up doing both: blades far from the snail are drawn in large clusters, while the near blades are drawn individually, and will wobble about when bumped into. Clusters are determined by putting the blades into a KD-tree. I hope to have time to write about this in detail later.
This took such a long time (about three months of my spare time). I am really glad that it ended up working. It was a big risk, and I felt bad about not making more progress on the story-side of the game, but the grass adds so much. Now I can get back to those parts that I have neglected.
Edit: Some rough statistics: There are more than 2000 blades of grass in the level, and it now runs at a frame rate of more than 40fps on my aged laptop. Drawing every blade individually (though without any dynamics) drops the frame rate below 20fps.
For the past year or so I’ve been working on making a video game. Actually that’s a lie: I made the first prototype for this game seven years ago. Back then I got the basic mechanics working for the player character, but I had no story to go along with it, and therefore no game.
This time I made exactly the same mistake, spending a few months getting the character’s motion working well before I had any idea where the game would go. But it has worked out well: the game play was interesting enough to inspire a friend to help with the script (hi Lara :) and now it’s well on the way. It’s being created in Blender.
In-game screenshot of Cargo
Cargo is a 3D adventure game. You play a snail who is on a mission to whoa! No spoilers just yet. But you can get an idea of the basic game play from the screenshot above: Cargo (the snail) can crawl on almost any surface and wraps around objects. The motion is fluid and quite engaging. A little too engaging: development is slow because I spend half of my time just playing the game. In fact, I think I might have a go now.