For a while now we have been close to being able to release a playable demo and I’ve been itching to get something online that shows the gameplay coming together since its really fun to play Franky here in the studio and videos don’t cut it anymore for an open, interactive project.

Chris made a small test level for playing Franky, with a range of asset that can be used as modules for making your own levels too!
Pablo (VenomGFX) is working on animations and characters and I have been learning blenders game logic to get Franky to a playable state as well as a few bugfixes and logic brick additions.

Download the OGG Video (13meg)
Download packed Blendfile (57meg, Incompatible with 2.46, see below)

Special thanks to Brecht for his amazing GLSL shader work and Benoit Bolsee for writing a new game logic state machine. Thanks also to Mataii for optimizing Franky’s mesh and removing ~1700 triangles .

The response from the last post was overwhelming, We wanted to include peoples wacky animations but I’m afraid this would have set us back yet another day so we will have them included by the next update.
If anyones interested in making their own levels, this is not so hard, just edit the existing terrain, or add a “ground” property to any mesh and use the existing blocks to jump on.

Playing the Game
For this test level you collect and throw nuts, climb up the ledge, glide and run around.
This demo requires a modern graphics card (for Nvidia, 6+ Series for GLSL to work), Blender Apricot-Branch revision 15389 or higher - grab one from www.graphicall.org

Keys

• Up, Shift+Up to walk, Pressing Up while hanging climbs.
• Left/Right - Turn or Shimmy when hanging.
• Spacebar - Throw when you have collected a nut.
• K - Kick (no kick objects in example level yet)
• Z - Jump, Press twice to double-jump, hold to glide.
• F10 - Reset

What We Have

• Actions - Jump, DoubleJump, Run, Walk, Hang, Shimmy, Throw, Glide
• Collecting items.
• Armature driven ShapeKeys in the Game Engine (Thanks to Benoit)
• Blenders Shaders in the GameEngine.
• Game locic state machine to separate groups of logic into states (more on this later).
• Linked Set Scenes from external files to manage game logic in one place.
• Simple Camera system that detects obstacles.

Whats Missing

• Loop the loop, Climbing tree’s
• Enemies
• Water
• Interactive objects to jump on
• Group Instances dont work in the game engine yet
• HUD Has to be merged with the new state machine logic
• Blenders Bullet physics library needs updating to get anisotropic friction with the ground to work right. Now were working around the problem but side effects are you can run through walls.
• Optimizations, Level of Detail
• Wont run the the Blender Player yet because its missing Blender.Mathutils module
• Sounds haven’t been added into the game logic
• Testing on different graphics cards and hardware.

Notes

• the franky in this demo has rotated wrists, please use THIS rig for animations.
• Their are reports of the game engine crashing with ATI cards, we need to look into this.
• As of revision 15426 improvements made by Benoit break jumping. Next test demo will have modified gamelogic to support this.