Yo Frankie! DVDs Shipped! Nov 21, 2008

Over 1100 sold. I'll be honest and humble about it, by comparison to what it could have been, this game is utter magnificence. It's not the grandest of results possible, but I am happy with the overall achievements of the project. An immense amount of development has gone into the blender game engine during the project after we made the switch from the crystal space engine. Between the CS leads and the state of the b2cs plugin, a nearly total abandonment was the only solution. Before hand the only force standing between the blender game engine and the graveyard was a titan mortals have named Benoit, but the engine is pretty much guaranteed a permanent spot in the blender code now. The game itself, is a demo really. We wasted a lot of time on people and software and in switching to the blender game engine lost half of our team, and this was over halfway into the project. There are 2 main levels and a number of extra levels, the goal is just to run through them and bully(kill, drown, melt, and explode) other animals in your way. It's been hailed as the world's first animal abuse simulator, so you know it's good. The game and all of it's content will be available for free download at www.yofrankie.org in a couple of weeks. Check out the game art gallery for more images of the game.

Published Art Nov 18, 2008

Recently I've had my work printed in two books. It was a great day indeed for those books. In fact, these pages alone are worth the cost of the book, you get the rest for free. I would suggest buying multiple copies. When the worth of the dollar fades away, these babies will be as good as gold, or at the very least, decent kindling for those long cold nights locked inside your basement with cannibals banging on the hatch. My winning Bullet physics entry from 2007 has images printed on 3 pages in Bounce, Tumble, and Splash, even with my own 2-page spread! This book covers really interesting topics I've never even touched in Blender. I'm not just blowing smoke when I recommend this. This is a fun book to read through. The second edition of the Game Kit is slated for release soon. It was great news to hear during the Apricot project that Ton wanted to get Carsten in to start working on the second edition. I never read the first one but considering the game engine was about to be hung out to dry for Blender 2.5, this was just more confirmation that it's here to stay. After Apricot I helped Carsten create a submarine level for his racer game for the book. For anyone interested in the blender game engine as an alternative to failed open source game engines like crystal space, I'd pick this book up. Even for experienced users the book covers the recent and major advances in the game engine thanks to Brecht, Benoit, and Campbell during Apricot.