Erwin Coumans, the person behind the Bullet Physics engine, will give away a PSP to the winner of the recently concluded Build A Cool Blender Game – Win a PSP contest.

Watch the contest entries in action at YouTube.

I think that an using an integrated content creation, game development, and physics solution like Blender/Bullet/Python (Blender’s scripting language – pythonistas should feel right at home :) ) is a great starting point for beginning game developers who want to plunge into 3D. While some may argue that using such an environment restricts the developer’s control, I still think that there is no such thing as wasted knowledge, especially in game programming. And for some people, having less control, at least in the beginning, may be a good thing because there are less things than can potentially be broken, and more energy may be devoted to the game concept rather than on technical details. And the skills learned may be applied to future game development projects.

I should try making a Blender game one of these days – it sounds like fun. Make your 3D content in Blender, use Python to formulate the game logic, and let Bullet figure out how to make everything fall into place :) .

With initiatives such as CrystalBlend and the Blender-OGRE integration, game development in Blender will probably prove to be a viable option for game developers who want to write the next generation’s games.

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