While I’m still prone to model my own designs and make my own animations within Blender, I find its game engine to be far too skull crushing to get into without already knowing how to use Python. I’ve seen demo videos on UDK, and found that it can do all that I need for my game with MUCH more ease. (By the way, I would get Unreal Engine 4, but I’m running a 3gb 32 bit Windows 7 computer, so it won’t let me)
I don’t need an engine that has a bunch of pre-made models and animations, nor does it NEED to be a click and drag setup. I just need to know if a I can create the basic functions of my specific game without doing any (or much) scripting. My basic functions go as follows.
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Working in Blender, I found it impossible to make my character’s jump animation play ONLY ONCE after it was pressed before landing on the ground, then switching to the fall animations/state, then switching to landing. This is not even considering the fact that I was trying to make a double jump. I couldn’t assure that the double jump animation would play after the first jump animation, and would remain FALSE until the player landing on the ground. The entire system of properties, collision sensors and ray sensors were too confusing, and no one I talked to explained it in a way that I could understand. (Side note, it’d be super cool if UDK can also input animations for jumping off of walls or running on walls. Again, I can animate all this myself if I have to, frankly, I want to.)
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Attack combos were by far the most frustrating part. I would animate two different punch animations, and set them to play on two different states My problem was that you could hold the punch key and it would play forever, and very RARELY did it switch to the second punch animation. Then, once you let go of the punch key, your player character would stay stuck in that position, and nothing you did could get him out… Other times the player would continuously player one or both the animations forever without end. My goal was to at least program a 4 hit combo to make a basic prototype where you ran around punching robots and killing them.
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Lastly, I wanted to make a health bar animation system that properly recharges when you collided with the object assigned to restoring your health. The problem here for some reason, was that whenever I tried setting this up, I would give the Health Pack an integer property, and tell it to give the health bare a value of 100 once the player collided with it, but the result would be the health bar animation glitching in and out of being full, or at the same level it was beforehand, either that or nothing would happen at all.
Honorable mentions include a score system, a level up system, and a weapons/inventory system, all of which would have driven me to suicide if I continued trying to develop them in Blender, lol.
If what I listed is possible to make in UDK, and if I can import my level models, players, (with their rigs of course) enemies and all that other good stuff, please let me know, cuz I’m just about done with Blender.