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Sunday, May 13, 2007

Design your own games...

Who hasn't wanted to make their own computer games? It's a fantasy many game players hold -- designing levels, programming artificial enemies, and making millions of dollars on your hard work Okay, the money may not be realistic, but we're fantasizing here. Imagine churning out first-person shooters, action horror, third-person adventures, auto racing, outer space shootouts and other games in a matter of minutes. You can do that and more with 3D Game Maker. Focus Multimedia and Dark Basic Ltd. packaged a number of features into their program, making you a game designer in minutes.
Getting Started

3D Game Maker uses a point and click interface to get you up and running. If you've spent countless hours toiling over scripting codes for other games, then you will appreciate its simplicity. The program comes with everything you'll need to make as many playable and exchangeable games as you wish. The purpose of 3D Game Maker is to allow you to customize a game you want to make.

How easy is it? You begin by selecting either beginner or standard mode from the interface screen. The beginner mode doesn't have all the options (such as editing a level or placing objects) that you'll find in the standard mode, but it is the fastest way to learn 3D Game Maker as you go along.

For the truly lazy there is an option to have the program randomly generate a game for you to play. But that takes the fun out of doing it on your own. There are also some pre-made games you can play through to give you some idea of what the software can do.

Next, choose one of eight possible genres (scenes) for you game -- shooter, horror, war, space, driving, jungle, cartoon, or silly. Under each of these categories are pre-made characters, weapons, textures, sounds and more specific to that genre. For example, if you select "space," then you'll only have access to 3D Game Maker's space-related tools (textures, players, levels, etc). Or if you want to make an adventure game, you're offered jungle scenes, animal characters, etc. 3D Game Maker comes with more than 360 pre-made scenes and over 500 3D objects. If that's not enough, users can scan their own images, import 3D models and download free objects from the official 3D Game Maker site. Kiss your free time good-bye.


Now that your scene is selected, you'll add enemies, toss in weapons and obstacles (or power ups), name the game, and play. Characters depend on the genre you select. But these are not the high polygon creations found in today's games. Close your eyes and imagine the early days of gaming. I'm talking about the birth of 3D characters. They're blocky and have graceless movement, but heck they're cute.

The developers went a little insane when offering characters. Yes, there are people such as cops and soldiers, but have you ever wanted to be a killer tomato? This assortment will add hours of fun to the program. An end boss who's an evil kangaroo or marshmallow man is genius. If you don't want to fight a bad guy simply change the game's objective to "collect all pick ups" or something similar.

Final thoughts;
There have always been products spouting how easy they are in creating a game from scratch. 3D Game Maker means it. Without the use of a user manual, I had no trouble making game after game. This may not get me hired at id Software, but I can dream.

Useful info:


Game Type: Game Development
Developer: Dark Basic Ltd.
Publisher: Focus Multimedia
Multiplayer: N/A 3D Card Requirements: 8 MB DirectX Compatible
Minimum System Requirements: Windows 95/98/ME, Pentium II 400 MHz, 64 MB RAM, DirectX 8.0, DirectX-compatible sound card, 4x CD-ROM drive, 600 MB hard-disk space.

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