- the making of...the place to be
(cant wait? play the game now)

This was my first blender project. In case you dont know it, blender is a free 3d program. It has many great features and now it has game support.

I had a look at blender a few months before starting and saw that it had great potential. It has a game engine with physics, collision detection and what they call "logic bricks". With these you can add some interactivity to your 3d scenes.

The only problem was that to distribute your games people had to download blender and run your game from inside the program which is not cool.

I decided to wait.

2 months later i had a look at it again and was surprised to read that they were going to release a web plugin soon. So i started working on a game for it.

here is what i did:

After learning how to use it i started with some tests regarding physics. I still didnt´t have an idea of what i wanted, specilly because i didnt know what was possible.

you can see in the first shot that i created a box with a simple "up arrow-go forward" action. I put it on a higher plane because i wanted to see how it falled and bounced.

Then i created a small circuit where i could test my "car". :-). You can see that Ihad a 3rd person view and full arrow keys controls.

I realized that i didnt like how the "car" reacted and that making a racing game was stupid because there are millions. So I added a small key control that changed the concept radically. If you press CTRL or Z you can fly!

So... I added some mountains to test my cool flying donut.

I created a scenary full of mountains, valleys etc. I was huge but it was starting to look like a flight sim and i didnt want that. The controls werent like a plane, it was more like a UFO so i decided to make a scenary that worked better with my donut.

Here is the first result. I started with a simple cube and extruded it to what you can see here. The idea was to create a structure that you could explore and the goal was collection those balls within a time limit. It was nice but you didnt get the feeling of being surrounded by the scenary. It was good in some places but i didnt like the whole thing. Now that i knew what was perfect for the "donut" i started again with that in mind.

Here are the first steps of the new structure. I had small rooms where i was going to put the balls and narrow streets that you could navigate.

This is more or less the final thing. I also made it with a single cube and extruded it to what you can see. I also closed it like a racing circuit so that you could follow a path to collect them and if you wanted you could just move freely.

then i started adding textures. I couldnt add many because it was going to be a downloadable web game. I only used 1 texture, it looked strange but futuristic. it was ok for the moment. As you can see i change the collectable balls to something with less polygons and vertex painted them. There is only one object, the rest are instances of it.

But that racing thing was still in my mind and wanted to apply some of the racing concepts to this flying thing so i started another variation...

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