It was such an exhilarating experience. My own little test-gamer, right hand on the mouse, and left hand doing W, S, A and D. Linus 6-yo doing the smoke test for my very first attempt at creating a 3D first person adventure game in Blender.

I got plenty of feedback. My game is a platformer, if you will: there’s a large warehouse, which has some rubble in it. On the wall there are 20 or so stepping stones. The player’s goal is naturally to try and climb these stones!

Doing a prototype in Blender isn’t child’s play, though. I have probably spent a good 200+ hours all in all learning all kinds of things.

Well, if you’re familiar with Blender, the 2.79 (any pre-2.80 versions) are epic. The software is a magnificent piece of effort, but to be honest, it’s not the easiest UI paradigm to learn.

Blender has some intuitive parts – yes, some. The rest are un-intuitive! 😀 Fear not! The 3D business for the most part just is such: there’s no “powerful and super easy”. You basically have to pick either. Blender is powerful, and it’s not super easy.

I can tell you, learning Blender is fun! It’s certainly not impossible, even though it’s good to anticipate getting stuck at times. It just takes some time, and the good thing is that for most all of the things you could ever imagine..

a) someone has actually done it into Blender, as plugin or otherwise

b) someone has also documented, on a blog post, or in a Youtube video

Blender Guru to the rescue!

Highly recommended, the Blender Guru channel.