Blade: Free Visual Novels Game Engine Review
Make Story-driven RPG Games for Free with the Blade Engine
Mar 28, 2009
The Blade visual novel game engine allows the user to make 2D story-centric video games for Windows using a simple interface and an easy to learn scripting language. The only game type that the Blade Engine can make is the visual novel, which is the computer equivalent of the Choose-Your-Own Adventure(tm) books that reached the height of their popularity in the mid-'80s.
The visual novel game type is massively popular in Japan as a form of artistic expression that is an interactive extension of the Manga comic book. Lacking the more sophisticated toolset of rival visual novel game engine, Ren'Py, the Blade Engine philosophy is one of simplicity, enabling maximum creativity with minimum effort.
The ease of using the Blade Engine allows the game maker to concentrate on developing the story and making the game assets rather than wading through pages of technical documentation or struggling to learn complicated code.
Blade Engine Visual Novel Features
The Blade Engine offers only the most basic features required by a game maker to create a visual novel. These features include:
- Displaying and moving character images and backgrounds.
- Displaying text and messages.
- Play movies, music, sound effects and voice overs.
- Generate story path selection through IF/ELSE conditions.
- Save and Load game function.
- File packing ability, creating an executable file to protect game content.
The Blade Engine also supports a number of special effects that are common to visual novel games, such as character fade-ins and fade-outs, character slide-ins and slide-outs, a roll-back function, a quake screen function, and blackout and whiteout effects.
Blade Game Engine Support
The Blade game engine is supported by a series of online tutorials, a user forum and a single page manual. While with most game engines, a detailed manual is a must, the bare bones nature of the Blade Engine makes longer instruction unnecessary: the game system just really is that simple to master.
The Blade Engine 2D Game Maker
There is little to criticize the Blade visual novel engine for. There appears to be so little to it, and yet, it delivers exactly what it proposes to do: enable the easiest creation of visual novel games so that even the least technically minded of users can use it with confidence.
And it achieves that aim. The Blade Engine is undoubtedly the simplest solution available for making visual novel 2D games. It is perfect for the game-making beginner, younger children with an interest in game development or the casual hobbyist. The apparent simplicity of this 2D game maker can make it easy to forget that games made with the Blade Engine can be sold commercially royalty-free.
The Blade Engine can be downloaded from the official Blade Engine website.
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