Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Using a Game Engine...

I really think that making an exploratory "game" for part of our final class project has a lot of potential. I shot some footage (please excuse the bad frame rate; my video capture program is terrible) of one of the demos that comes with Gamebryo (a commercial game engine). From a programming standpoint, it's not very difficult to change the environment, change the "player", and put some people doing idle activities into this scene! Also, this opens up opportunities for several students to model/color buildings and/or people, which can then be inserted into the "game". The only issue, I suppose, is related to copyright infringement (since Gamebryo is not open source). I do indeed have a valid license for it, and since we're not intending to sell anything here, maybe this isn't an issue after all. But I'd still need to check. Another issue is public access to the final product. Users would have to download an .exe file before playing the game, so embedding this kind of thing into a website is probably a no go. However, we could show video footage of one of us playing it, and provide a download that users could click on.