I had an idea for a new game project to work on. It will be a top-down 3D voxel sandbox survival game.
The map will be square and finite, and the player will start in one corner. The setting will be night time in a forest type area - modern day time, and the only initial light source will be a lamp post in that corner.

The player is left in this open area after crash landing there, and has to survive through the night until the rescue team arrives the next morning. The player will be able to go out from the spawn point and collect resources to construct a fortress from monsters during the night.

Before comparing this to Minecraft, the mechanics of the game will be much more restricted. The player will only be able to construct a certain number of blocks to build up his fortress. The monsters will be diverse and have certain advantages and disadvantages to types of defenses used. To drive the game forward, there will be special items in the far reaches of the map that will aid the player, such as automated turrets.

If you would like to make a comparison, this game could be seen as a mix of Minecraft, Turret Defense, and Project Zomboid.

Release Candidate 3 for the Maze Creator game has been released. You can download it here.

As always, please let me know if you find any bugs. Suggestions are also welcome!

New:
-More Maze generation options
-Multiple Layers
-Spears
-Portals (aka teleporters)
-Enemies & path nodes
-Ladders
-Checkpoints

To-do:
-Add in a custom sequence feature for the Enemy's path following system
-Add more menu icons (some buttons are blank and only have tooltips to describe them)

I broke all save files made with the released 4.0 versions of the Maze Creator!
It was for a just cause, though. Multi-layers have been implemented, as well as Ladders and multi-layer travel for player mode.

It was unbelievably easier to implement it into this version of the Maze Creator compared to when I tried to add it the old version.

New Release Candidate coming soon!

So a little over a week ago, I decided it was about time to get some serious work done on the Maze Creator game. I already had a title screen design (as seen in the previous blog post), and the next step was to build a dynamic menu system. Long story short, the game now has all core assets implemented in a new flexible and interconnected way, which allows me to easily add new content to the game.

In technical terms, almost all of the game's mechanics are executed from one Python Module controller. The programming for the game is Object Oriented, and allows each individual class to be linked to the "parent" class that created it - which makes retrieving data from certain parts of the game very easy and organized.

I'm still adding in basic blocks, and I'm nearly half way done with adding in the Advanced objects such as Doors and Enemies.

Downloads & Release Candidates:
As well as submitting this blog post, I have also released Maze Creator v4.0a Release Candidate 2.
See the Release Candidates section on the Download page for the .blend file (blender 2.62).

Executable:
Until there is a way to create a lightweight .exe for Blender games, I won't ever be releasing one.
The size of the Maze Creator at v4.0 is about 1.6 MB, and the size of an .exe with the files it depends on is a total of 100 MB. You can still download Blender as a .zip archive from their website, so you don't have to install it.

Completed Content:
-Menu system
-Maze Generation (+ random generation)
-Loading/Saving (uses a slightly different format, will eventually add support for old .MAZE files)
-Improved Edit mode
-Gameplay mode (+ death)
-Basic blocks
-Dart Launchers, Doors & Buttons

To Do:
-More Menu graphics
-Multiple Layers (half-way done)
-Spears (time delay/motion triggered; difficulty: 1/5)
-Portals (difficulty: 2/5)
-Enemies (difficulty: 5/5)
-Ladders (for travel between layers; difficulty 3/5)
-Checkpoints (difficulty: 4/5)

Also:
The Doors in Maze Creator v3.6 ARE broken in the latest version of Blender. This was due to an update in Blender's animation system. Doors are no longer keyframed in v4.0 and work much better.

Screenshots:
Everybody likes screenshots, right? Right.

It's been a while since I did any work on my Maze Creator game. I've recently started working on a new menu system (as of about 3 days ago) and decided to work on a title screen as well.

No video footage yet, but the camera moves slowly around the scene

Here's the official blog post for my Realistic Enderman concept. It is a Work in Progress.

I'm using Blender 2.61 for modeling, retopology, and rendering. I'm also using Sculptris for sculpting a high detail mesh, which I'll use to bake a normal map for the lower-poly retopologized model.

_Unlike my other Realistic concepts (the Creeper and Ghast), this model has a lot more detail and better topology.

This isn't exactly site related, but it is Blender related and I found it pretty cool. I'm guessing that most of you reading this have probably seen it from Blender Nation's blog posts, but here it is anyway.

This trailer video was made almost entirely with Blender, and there is currently a prototype version of the game being developed (for the Unity game engine). Read more about it on their blog:
http://spielebaustelle.wordpress.com/

I was reading about the 2.59.3 unofficial Blender release. Although I have yet to try it out, I read that the animation system received quite a bit of improvement from Blender user Moguri. These improvements allow you to control animation from entirely within a Python script, no f-curve actuators required.
("f-curve" was also removed and combined with the Action and Shape key actuators into a single "Action" actuator)

While these features aren't currently present in the official release (v 2.59.0), they should be included in the next update of Blender. If you're interested in the development, the 2.59.3 build is available somewhere on GraphicAll.org

So why am I making this post? (who am I even talking to, does anyone read these posts?)
The answer to the first question is that this improvement, when officially released, will require an update in the health bar tutorial. It should make triggering animations much easier, and open up a lot more possibilities.

Edit: Just got the 2.6 Release Candidate (testing version) and tried out this new feature. It works very nicely, I like it!

Just announcing that I've added a "Projects" section to the site where I keep updated info on my main projects with Blender.
Here are the first two projects so far: