Free Game Designer

Before I even get started, Panda3d is a nice engine, don't be fooled by talk of making 2d simple games and don't be fooled to thinking its got bad graphics cause of the games that have been made with it. Panda3d is a free, open source engine used by Disney to make ToonTown and Pirates of the Caribbean Online games. You might not like the graphics or the theme in these games but thats up to the developer, not the engine, also these are pretty popular games anyway that prove the code works. Plus, they are both Multiplayer Online games, something that could be used to make any little game more interesting. Check the Panda3d wikipedia page, devmaster.net reviews, sourceforge.net Panda3d page or the screenshots on the main site for some more ideas of what can be done with the engine, if you downloaded it already check out some of the samples in the samples folder.

The biggest change I have seen so far in the newest Panda3d is the Shader Generator, which will make it easier to use a few shader types and even add in your own if you can code C++. After looking around on the forums some, it looks like there may be a few more updates over the next few weeks, so there may be a few new tools to use soon along with any bug fixes.

I've been working on modifying the Asteroid demo, between World of Warcraft sessions and sleeping haha, but I think it should come out pretty cool. The plan for the first little project will be to change up some of the code to add new weapons etc, then change the textures with GiMP and eventually add a few 3d objects with Blender. If we are lucky I will add a enemy AI for the demo and real lucky some simple multiplayer, since those will both be needed for the next little game anyway. I'm going to continue playing with some idea's and should have a update soon.