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Ohai!

I did not update for a long time due to severe procrastination. But here I am and the last days I did some serious work on the AI of my melons.
Here is a gif of an autonomous watermelon running in a simple circuit:

This is taken directly from the editor. The numbers displayed refer to the distance until the next checkpoint as I used the sample algorithm for path finding. You can see them changing when the melon reaches a checkpoint (the yellow cubes).

I'm pretty satisfied with the result since the AI is better than me at this game. So much that I will need to artificially lower its maximum speed to draw a better learning curve for the player. Here is a gif where you can see me running against the AI (I'm the one taking shortcuts):

At full speed, I expect the AI to be really tough and the player will need to give everything and use shortcuts to beat it :)
Now that the editor is "good enough" to help me design tracks, I will focus on the main gameplay by implementing laps, power ups, etc.

Last but not least, I'm on twitter (@minitrope), if you feel like following me, that would be much appreciated (I almost exclusively tweet about games).

Thanks for reading :)

Oh, hey, you're using the BGE. Cool! If I may ask, what made you decide to go with the BGE for this project?

(For those who don't know, BGE stands for Blender Game Engine. Yes, Blender has a game engine!)

Hey SolarLune! The short answer: Blender is the tool I know the most when it comes to game creation.

Long answer: For my last game I wanted something in 3D so I had to know how to model stuff on my own. Thus I started to learn how to use Blender. And then I heard about the BGE so I gave it a try.
While the BGE is definitely not the best engine out there, it's the most straight forward tool I could use since I knew a bit of Blender already. It's also really pleasant to not have to switch between tools: everything is in one place (or almost). Moreover I knew python already so I could jump straight into making more complex stuff if needed. And finally, it's free software and it's a big plus for me.

For those out there who would like to start making simple 3D games, I would really recommend them to give Blender a go. And if you have concerns about python, well, I'm doing some AI stuff in my game and it still run at 60 fps so it's all good for now :)

I used to use the BGE as my main tool for years as well, but it had some issues that I wasn't satisfied with. I'm not sure of the current state of the BGE at the moment, so I can't say for sure how it is anymore. My main problem was with crashes on a system, and being unable to debug it (because the codebase is a bit large, to say the least, haha). Maybe the issue was the user didn't have the windows C++ redistributable.

In any case, I would recommend that you test on a variety of different users' machines to ensure that the game runs smoothly.

Anyway, keep it up!