Have You Ever Wanted to be a 3D Game Developer?
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When I was a kid, we had a Commodore 64 computer. It had a program that would allow you to create little games. It was kind of cool, but they were nothing like what you can create and play today. The tools for game creation today are just so advanced and complex, right? Not necessarily, no. Alex sent me an email with a link to the Alice project. Alice is educational software that allows you to learn programming in a 3D environment.
Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.
In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.
The software is about as easy as it can be, in terms of giving you control over what you’re doing, while still being accessible. It doesn’t matter how old you are, you can still use Alice. You’re never too old to learn something new. I believe a fair amount of people who follow me online would want to do something like this. Alice may be the way that you can become more than you are today. Learning to create a game could lead to an awesome future for you in that career field.
This is a great, free opportunity, no matter what your background is… and no matter what operating system you’re running on. Maybe this will be your first time messing with attempting to create a game. Heck, I still remember my first time with it, and that was a couple of years ago. This is just so much better than what I had to work with. This tool won’t transform your entire life. But it is worth a shot. If you’re a teacher, or a student, or just someone wanting to dabble… it doesn’t matter. The Alice tools could help you jumpstart something very cool.
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16 Comments
Updates ~ Blog Network
September 25th, 2008
at 10:16am
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Doug McFarlane
September 23rd, 2008
at 7:21am
Was the C64 program: Garry Kitchen’s GameMaker?
I tried that a few times. Some of the included games were quite fun actually.
Plus, there’s quite a few packages out now for designing 3D games for the PC, such as DarkBasic. Or, for the programmer, add a library such as TrueVision3D to your favorite language to simplify all the 3D programming.
Arthur Abogadil
September 23rd, 2008
at 4:30pm
Yeah, Alice is a good introduction to programming software that is also a game dev package. I’ve tried it in the past and its nifty, maybe i’ll be checking it again later. It’s also worth mentioning that Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta is now available, but the XBOX 360 export is not yet enabled in the beta, they said that it will be available on the final release.
kdb424
September 25th, 2008
at 4:49am
Yes I have, and I have developed many 2D games, and am on the way to school for programming. A better question is can you make a game for us viewers. lol
Mike
September 25th, 2008
at 6:06am
Yeah, in another life I wanted to be a game developer. Then I found out how much math was involved!
I settled on becoming a web app developer. :)
Cubs
September 25th, 2008
at 8:36am
Wow, this seems pretty cool. I’ll definitely check this out. I have a little bit of background in this, but hopefully I will able to learn a little more with this program.
Eggy (or theeggman)
September 25th, 2008
at 10:56am
I originally heard about this project when I was completing one my college programing classes (Basic C++) about two years ago or so. I’m glad to see that its finally available for anybody to try. While I haven’t quite had the time to explore completely, but I really want to and I hope others do as well.
George
September 25th, 2008
at 2:46pm
Hey Chris, i wasnt around for the beginning of apple or Microsoft and all that jazz but my friend actually made an online game and it was up for a while. It was called Paco’s Realm. It doesnt exist anymore but it was cool while it lasted.
Cya, Borge
bigthboy
September 25th, 2008
at 4:10pm
Yeah, I’ve always wanted to be a game developer…second behind what I’m doing which is the owner of a tech company… And in all actuality, video game studios are a technology company. One specific game idea I actually tried to make a reality and had my own start-up for it. We ended up getting a lot of artwork done, a little bit of programming (not much), and had the opportunity to present it to MS Games. Well, things didn’t work out in our favor and now that’s shelved until later when I have the money to do it myself :P….
I learned about Alice a short time after that. I’ve already started another venture else Alice might be something I’d use to restart the game project. :P
jonas3d
September 26th, 2008
at 1:57am
Hey Chris another easy tool for a newbie game developer is http://www.sploder.com/ http://www.gamemaker.nl and http://realityfactory.info. Very cool stuff very easy to use.
Jess
September 26th, 2008
at 11:50am
i always wanted to be a game designer. gaming is so much fun with friends or just by yourself!
TylerInZeeHowze
September 26th, 2008
at 1:46pm
I would love to become a 3D game designer, and being a beginner I’ve tried a lot of different software tools on Mac OSX and Windows, and so far I think that the standard tools on Mac OSX (X Code, Quartz Composer, Instruments, Dashcode, etc.) work very very well. It’s great if you can jump into it and learn easily like I can. If you are really really just beginning (for example have no idea what C++ or any programming languages are) then I would try out GameMaker 7 for Windows. This is great for beginners, because it starts you off by learning everything on a drag and drop user interface, then if you want to get into more difficult things like 3d animations, then they start you out writing a simplified version of C++ (I believe it is) that uses similar names an functions that are used in the graphical drag and drop version. I like Mac OSX’s programming tools, but I did start out on GameMaker 6/7. The only dis-advantage of GameMaker is that it is $20 or so if you want the full version compared to X Code and Mac OSX’s programming tools that are free for download with an Apple Developer Connection account (these tools also usually come with the iPhone/iPod touch SDK). I am awaiting to try Alice as mentioned above, but until I can really try it, I’m not going to say anything about it (I’ll be sure to comment as soon as I get a chance to check it out.
I’m a member on Geeks if anyone has any questions/comments, too.
TylerInZeeHowze
Bror
September 26th, 2008
at 4:12pm
Yeah, I really want to be a games programmer and I’m starting my programming course next year :D
I will be starting out with Visual Basic and I will after that be going over to C++. Visual Basic is a good first programming language as far as I heard since it is pretty easy and teaches you the basics of programming. C++ is pretty much the most used language for programming and if you know C++ you can get gaming programming jobs easier (game producers are often seeking “C++ experts”).
If you’re not entirely sure that you want to be programming most of your life you should probably not get into it. To get a good job in programming you have to be very good at it. And becoming good at programming requries quite a lot of work.
I don’t quite enjoy games all that much but I would really like to create them, I love creating things that other people love such as music and other creative things :P
LittleBigRedTruck
September 26th, 2008
at 5:46pm
You know… I have also ways been interested in games and technology and I have had this edge of making my own games and programs like this help me a lot since I don’t quite understand all part of game making. Even though you make cheesy games they are fun like pacman or tetris(Chris’s favorite and my mom’s). They may be lame but can be very addicting for hours and hours on end. I think one day I will make video games for fun and I hope I do. I don’t know maybe I will be the next game console maker too!
Cole
September 26th, 2008
at 6:56pm
YES that is one of my great dreams!!!! if only if only =/ i have expreimented with alice tho its a good program and i love it so far
GABRIELLA
February 17th, 2009
at 1:18pm
i wanna game that u can get pregnet and not download cuz ma grandma is really strict about downloading stuff so pleae make me a game like that any questions please contact me at gabbychula10@yahoo.com please please make a game that u can have a baby and sex sorry for my laugage and make ur avater and just play like real life so i can experricness how u have a baby please :(