If you can recall a previous article, the Blender Game Engine is currently undergoing huge developments led by Entertainment Arts Research. Here's a 'brief' update of some of the new things we're seeing appearing currently, plus a more recent demonstration video of Yo Frankie.

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The results of Campbell's YoFrankie level design contest are now online. The first, second and third place entries are certainly very nice and worthy of their prizes.

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Campell Barton (Ideasman42) has started a new contest in the wake of the successful release of Yo Frankie. The aim of the contest is to develop a new level for the game, and there's prizes up for grabs for those who do best!

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Now that most/all of the Yo Frankie DVDs have arrived around the world, the whole project has been put online for free download.

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Yep, that's right. The shiny new Apricot DVDs are ready and are now at the Blender Institute, arriving today from the printing factory.

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According the the Yo Frankie site, the game will be delayed 1 week due to a serious bug in the game engine.

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Ton just announced that the Apricot DVD Master is ready and should go to the printer today:

Just a short note! DVD is done, we’re still doing some tests, and we need Campbell for final blessings, but tomorrow it will be ready to go to the DVD reproduction factory!

Printing takes 2 weeks, shipping will happen during weekend of 1-2 november, customers will then get the copy within 1 (europe) or 2 (rest of world) weeks. Exciting!

Its release time for version 2.48! This is a game engine heavy edition, with a large amount of BGE updates and new tools. There's also plenty of non-game related updates and tools to keep everyone happy.

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The Yo Frankie! DVD is not out yet, but if you want to learn more about the logic used in the BGE, there is already a great page at the Blender Wiki, explaining a lot about the structure of the game.

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There's been a lot of posts lately about the Crystal Space version of Yo Frankie, but its time again for some more BGE updates. The first technical demo is now up for testing!

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The Mac Gamer just published a long interview with Chris Plush and Campbell Barton, "two long haired, clever fellows working on the development of the open source game Yo! Frankie". An interesting read with lots of background information on the project!

During last month's premiere of Yo Frankie! I was in for a bit of a surprise. Clearly I hadn't been paying enough attention, but about halfway down the project the decision was made to create two versions of the game: the Blender Game Engine Edition (BGE) and the CrystalSpace Edition (CSE).

Continue Reading 'Yo Frankie! First Crystalspace builds available' »

(Article submitted by Emil Kjaehr, Public Relations Manager of the Game Development Camp)

When high school students from all over Denmark gather at Aalborg University to develop computer games it is likely to be the world's largest arrangement of its kind. About 50 young men and women are using a part of their summer vacation to learn more about idea development, animation, programming, and not least, cooperation - from Pablo Vasquez and others.

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It would appear the Yo Frankie! site has changed. Many were greeted with a nice graphic showing that something was indeed changing on project site, now it has completely transformed.

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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 ;-).

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Last night I went to Amsterdam and met Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation / Blender Institute and Pablo Vazquez of the Apricot/Yo Frankie! project, Carsten Wartmann of BlenderBuch fame (and an old NaN colleague), and Frank van Beek, who is one of the founders of NeoGeo and an old NaN colleague. I still have a headache!

Beware: this movie is 26 minutes long :)

Continue Reading 'Apricot, Blender, Beer & Thai Food' »

I'll be visiting the Blender Institute later today and I hope I'll have a chance to talk to some of the people in the Apricot team. As they're in the last days of the project I'm sure they'll be busy enough, but I might just be able to squeeze a few minutes of attention out of them. What are your burning questions for them?

Update: thanks for all your input! I'll try to get the video up later today.

There's only 20 days left of the Apricot project (Yo Frankie!). Venomgfx (Pablo) has posted a new blog on the Apricot site regarding the plans for the final few weeks.

There's also a call for documentation/tutorial ideas to be included on the DVD, along with a list of ideas already thought up by the team for us to get excited about, so get on over to the blog and let them know what you'd like to see!

Continue Reading 'Final 20 days of Apricot' »