Creating a 2-Player Blender Game

I've played around with blender a bit and while my favorite is still VFX, I wanted to explore other things it can do. This time, I created a game. To keep it simple yet challenging, I made a 2-player football game.

My son has a stuffed toy he's really fond of so I based my game character on it.

Droozy

The character is quite simple so it was relatively easy to model. I got distracted for a while because I enjoyed recreating the fur using particles and rendering in cycles but after a while, I decided to remove the textures and particles of the character in the game.

Modeled Droozy 

Unlike the robot I used in my previous video which came from blendswap, I needed to rig the character myself.  With the help of the awesome people on the net, I was able to rig my character and got it ready to be animated.

Rigged Droozy

As it is, I can use it to composite a Ted-type movie effect which I plan to do later on but right now, let's get it to play some football.  I animated a run cycle that will loop to simulate a running character. Once I got that working, I added the other elements like the goal, ball, field, and set the properties.  Without any programming, I got the keyboard input to control my character.

I was going for a split screen view which took a bit more research.  Each player has a camera assigned and will follow them as they move around.  I found a viewport.py script that does just what I needed. It was just a copy-paste effort and I didn't need to touch the code itself so non programmers will still be able to follow along the tutorials.

To keep it simple, I didn't implement a scoring mechanism but I added some effect whenever someone makes a goal. After which, the game can be reset by pressing "N".  Here's a video of the game.  I recorded it using camstudio so the frame rate isn't that high.

 

Seeing the priceless look on my son's face after showing him his favorite stuffed toy come alive in the game,  makes all the trouble worthwhile. =)