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Posted by
Toby Crundwell
on November 13, 2001
Developed by: Dark Basic
Publisher: Actualize
Product: The 3D Game
Maker
Creation
There
are eight main settings from which to customize your game;
Scene, player, player’s bullets, game enemies, enemies’
bullets; obstacles, end of level boss and game items. Within
each setting there are nine or ten themes from which to
select items; Shooter, horror, war, space, driving, jungle,
cartoon, silly. You can also import custom themes, or themes
from the Internet. Within each theme there are sets of
items, of varying size.
For
“scenes”, there are 45 different items in each category
(which gives 360 scenes to choose from). Be aware that many
of the scenes within the same themes are similar though. All
are inside, as mentioned in T3DGM’s FAQ “This
is not possible. Only inside scenes are possible with the
scene editor. In fact the scene editor was a late addition
to the software so we restricted what it could do to ensure
we released for October”. Whilst
there is a great selection for themes, selections under the
rest are limited to nine per theme, giving 72 items for each
setting. There is also the promise of downloading more items
from T3DGM’s website, although at the time of writing I
was unable to do this. Items can be mismatched at will, for
example you can have enemies from “horror” and bullets
from “space”, it won’t make any difference. Equally
you can have a racing game in any of the scenarios.
All
of which is fairly straight forward, and unfortunately
breeds fairly similar games. Fortunately T3DGM also includes
a greater level of creation; you can also specify sounds
(again, from presets or user sound file) and game background
music. This is a great advantage, as I dislike 99% of the
music that games have. You can browse to your own MP3 files
of your choice. In a similar vein, texture files can be
changed, although I wouldn’t recommend doing so unless you
are something of an artist. The screen on the left can be
used to preview everything, from the linear path through the
scene to the way your enemy dies.
After
going through each category & selecting or modifying
each individual setting to your taste, there is a final
“global settings” page to go through, in which details
of gameplay are defined (all other settings deal largely
with graphics and music). With so much else dedicated to
graphics and sounds, you would be forgiven for thinking
gameplay had been forgotten. “Global settings” include
the objectives (destroy all enemies and/or collect all
pickups and/or just complete the level), difficulty,
team-play & general appearance (most important being the
title screen where your introduction to the game is). It is
possible to have user FMVs as well, by importing your own
AVI file.
After
going through each category you can test out your game, and
make amendments as necessary. You can save is as a 3DGM
(*.3gm) file which can be edited later, or additionally an
external .exe file which does not need T3DGM to launch it
(however it cannot be edited by T3DGM). Similarly to the
install process, this hogs up disk space; external files are
unnecessarily massive.
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