Chapter 1. Things You Need to Know
The Blender Game Engine (BGE) is one of the most interesting parts of Blender. This book will help you to get started and make games by modeling low poly objects and animated interactive characters, and use them in the Game Engine with basic controls and more. To learn the BGE, you'll need to learn a Node Editor which provides you with an easy-to-use visual interface (logic blocks) to design games without requiring any knowledge of programming.
The Node Editor has a visual way to set up Composite and show the results. Logic blocks can be connected, which together allows you to create visually complex results. There are three different types of logic blocks in the BGE: sensors, controllers, and actuators. Each of these has a different number of sub-types. Using this system, you can make a character respond to your keyboard input events or set up some basic Artificial Intelligence (AI) behavior for your enemy characters, objects, or environments of the game.
To make games with Blender, we can begin in the section called Logic Editor (sections in Blender are called editor types). Game Logic is what causes anything to happen in the game. The blocks (or "bricks") that you can see represent pre-programmed functions that can be tweaked and combined to move the player, interact with the world, change the level, and more. In short, it helps you create the game.
At the beginning, we do not need cool models, only a cube (by default, Blender shows it) to represent our player in order to move in our 3D environment. We will learn how to move it and how it collides with a wall (plane). If we do that, we can then proceed to substitute our poor model (a cube) and wall for a cool character and good environments. Are you ready?
This book assumes that you haven't had any, or very little, experience in using Blender, so we will go through these chapters step-by-step.
In this chapter we shall:
- Find out about the Interface of the Logic Editor
- Learn how to use the Logic Bricks Editor
- Start the Game Engine