Game Engines Galore....

So in the search for interesting storytelling tools I've been looking into game engines. I am totally overwhelmed by how many there are out there! Follow these two links to see what I mean:

Mod DB
Wiki List

Wow! Ok, so a quick run through the list brought me to one that I've actually tried before (duh, I hadn't figured that they were game engines cause I'd done like simple 2d stuff on them, engine just sounds so 3D...)

So yeah, if you can do 2D graphics and just want to get started trying stuff out without spending more than a day or two on figuring out the engine, I'd suggest downloading the Multimedia Fusion 30 day demo. This little program has very simple and quick drag and drop functionality which lets you assign and test for collisions, make things appear (or vanish) on collision, test if all objects have been collected (and go to the next level) and other simple game actions like that. It comes with a whole bunch of graphics you can use to get started and it's just plain fun and gives almost instant gratification. It's what we used at a summer camp I was teaching at and the kids made awesome games in a week's time! That said, it is 2D, so FPS and such nifty 3D things are out of the question, but lots of fun anyways. The end result is an .exe file (plus a .dll you need to put in the same folder).

Now the 3D stuff... well, I haven't advanced much... So far I've rounded up all the games I actually had access to which included source engines, so now I've got the UnrealEditor, the Aurora (Bioware- Neverwinter Nights) and the Source (Valve -Half Life) engines to try out. All of these seem to have some sort of introductory documentation on each of their makers sites, so hopefully this weekend I'll finally get "in depth" at least with one of these. The thing about these engines is that whatever you do gets tied to the maker's of the engines and this could (or not) result in some issues later down the road... So I will also be checking out things like Unity (yes, they have released the pc version!) and Torque and perhaps also the open source OGRE and the cube 2 based Sandbox as alternative tools for independent game makers. In the meantime here are a couple of interesting things people are doing with the engines besides games:
Concerned (A Half Life based comic)
Game Engines for Music

The game engine music thing is from an artist called Julian Oliver and he's got a few other things using game engines to generate images. He's also got an awesome little "cube toy" thingy that mixes a realworld cube, webcam and computer vision with a controllable 3D space. Here is a video of that, until the next post!


levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.