Oh goodness, here’s a gem of a video I found while cleaning out my YouTube account earlier that has a heck of a story…

This little demo video is the final project for my Multimedia Production course back in round 1 of grad school, in all its glory.

When I was working on my Educational Technology Specialist Master’s degree, I took a course called Multimedia Production – which taught us skills for how to make multimedia classroom resources which could help enhance academic lesson plans. We were originally going to build two games, but our first game ended up eating up the entire semester, what with all the technology issues we encountered.

How did we make that first game, you ask?  Well, we assembled it in Blender, a free and open source 3D modeling program.  We spent a week or two learning how to do basic 3D modeling, then another couple weeks learning the basics of Python with a focus on using it to add keyboard controls to our game.  What ended up eating up the rest of the semester was game production.

Oh, the issues we encountered…

First, we had random bugs popping up here and there, and sometimes Blender wouldn’t work as anticipated – which can happen sometimes with software, I’ve dealt with buggy software enough to be able to roll with it when it gets cranky.  But the weirdness didn’t stop there.  Sometimes we’d encounter strange issues with the 3D worlds we were building – if you watch the video carefully, you’ll notice I’m very carefully avoiding a section of the floor towards the end of the video, and then making a beeline towards the door at the end of the maze – that’s because one chunk of the floor was apparently broken, even though I never did anything involving the floor aside from giving it a texture. If you walked the little person over that part of the floor you’d drop into eternity, and have to force-close the game or watch the little dude fall forever.  I never did figure out what was going wrong there…

The biggest issue we encountered, though: actually turning in our games.  We found out, towards the end of the semester, that eventually our Blender games would only load on the computer we’d been building them on.  Which, for some people, meant their game only worked in the computer lab we were in, or in my case, it only worked on my home desktop.  That made actually turning the games in for a grade impossible.

And here’s where this little demo comes in.  We were asked to record a play-through of our games using CamStudio,  I think it was, and submit that instead of the finished game file.  I gussied my game up a little bit with a couple of intro screens (you might have noticed my silly little jab of frustration at Blender with the bad guy named Lord Rednelb, heh) and an exit screen, and sent it on its way.  I think I got a 4.0, if I remember right, and I added 3D modeling and Python programming to the list of things I could do!