Free Game Designer

This is my first attempt at setting up a blog, hopefully it will be useful for my learning and anyone else that comes along can pick something up as well. I came close to setting up a full site and going all out a few times, but it felt like a bit too much to take on all at once so I'm gonna start with a few blogs instead to get into the habit of posting content regularly. Hopefully if all goes well I will have a few websites up and running soon.

For this blog I will try to talk about how easy it really is to download a few free programs and get into making games. Using GiMP, Blender and Panda3d you've already got most of what you need to make a full game, as long as you keep it simple you can do it alone, and those are just a few free programs out there. I've looked around alot for good free engines, and I've always wanted to make some good examples of how to use just free tools to make a game. During my searches in the past I have tried things like Kaneva a free mmorpg engine used to make World of Kaneva which at first seems like a great tool but the lack of good support cause a dead end early on before making a game seems possible, Multiverse another free mmorpg engine that didn't run that well on my old PC but seemed like a good choice. I tested out some of the others, vbgore, XNA etc, but one thing or another always seemed to cause me to lose interest fast, be it my PC, lack of features or requiring code compiling (never been a real good coder, plus getting it setup can be a pain).

There are many options out there, but I decided to use Panda3d as a example to start out because its a really good starting point for new game creators or even people who have been doing one thing or another, like modeling or modding a game for a while, making websites even, because its not only a easy starter coding language (python, easy and strong imho) but it doesn't need to compile. There are good examples and documentation to get anyone started quickly. Just going through the sample files will have you excited about what you could do pretty fast, all you need is a text editor, a bit of spare time to read and some patience (plus creativity of course). Most of that excitement can be found in python alone, which surprised me at first, being so easy and yet I had never tried it, Panda3d adds alot more functionality to it making alot of game functions simple.

Once I get the new version of Panda3d and play with it a bit, I'll get started talking about some of my experiences and how to make a simple game, using a few free tools and resources. In the meantime I will try to cover my thoughts on a few basic areas that should apply to learning any new software, and some general things I have came across to help any starter game designers out there get their brain babys up and running.

You don't need to shell out cash for programs like Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk 3ds Max etc, and hopefully I will be able to make that clear and fun to anyone who wants to find out for themselves, by sharing my experience making some small games.