Last night the Blender Institute had a small party to celebrate the end of project Apricot, or ‘Yo Frankie!‘. The team did a presentation of the game and aswered questions about its creation (video of the presentation included on their blog!). We all had a lot of fun playing and trying to make the characters do crazy things ;-).
About the result: I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to edit the game – even though Yo Frankie! Is not a 100% finished game, it’s real power is in providing people with the building blocks to create their own. Changing levels, importing fully functioning characters (just link to the file containing the character and you’re done!) – it’s all very easy thanks to the large number of new features and fixed bugs in the Blender Game Engine.Â
Because of this, I believe that this is the first Blender Institute project that will truly see a lot of derivative work (the Elephants Dream files were hard to understand, the Big Buck Bunny files require a LOT of computer horsepower to edit and render, but the Yo Frankie! files can be changed and played in seconds). Maybe this will mark the beginning of a new subcommunity for Blender where people create and share game objects so others can assemble them into working games? That would be truly awesome.
Sadly, the last two team members, Chris and Pablo (or Blengine and venomgfx) , will be flying home this weekend (Bye guys! It was a pleasure getting to know you!!). Over the next two weeks and they’ll be finishing up the last odds and ends from there. The ‘real’ release will be after that (although you can already grab all the required files from their SVN server and the Blender builds from graphicall, of course).
The CrystalSpace version of the game is said to be released later next week. It will be cool to compare the two :)
Kudos to everyone involved!! Don’t forget to leave your praise at the premiere blogpost – the team members are reloading that page like crazy to see all the new comments appear ;-)
Please support us
