Marbleland

I've started to build a test game for the engine. For now I'm calling it "Marbleland", until I come up with something better. Right now the main goal is to put the engine through its paces before moving on to a more marketable idea. In fact, here's the first screen shot of a test level I'm building:

At this point it probably looks like a cross between Tron and Marble Madness. I've gotten the basic player marble up and rolling and have built numerous models to represent different block heights. After building the models, I drew the level design on a piece of graph paper. The end result in the screenshot above took about two weeks total (a half hour here, a half hour there).

The process is going smoothly for the most part, although I had to relearn how to use Blender after switching from version 2.49 to 2.64. The UI overhaul on Blender is jarring at first, but it is so much easier to use. In fact, while searching for some tutorials I came across this fantastic video on UV mapping using the new interface. I highly suggest you check out some of the other related tutorials by this particular author.

I think the most surprising thing so far is the time each step of the process is taking. The model building was tedious at first, and the construction of the first level is going slower than expected. On the plus side, I have only made minor modifications to the base engine code.