An interesting new 3D real-time game creator from France called ShiVa Editor (beginner tutorials). It’s billed as a…
“WYSIWYG software for designing games and applications.”
… and it runs on top of their own game engine. If you were looking for an “iClone for game making” then this one might be worth a look. Their demo video of a 3D desktop zombie shooter game doesn’t look especially impressive (compared to what you could do with the new Unreal engine), but I’m guessing ShiVA might be especially manageable for making point & click 2.5D adventure-story games for the Web? One drawback might that it requires a Java plugin (ugh) to run games on the Web, whereas Unity is developing a plugin-free game module to run under Google Chrome (eta Q1 2012).
Content made with it is royalty-free. At around $2,000 the Pro/Advanced version is priced for businesses rather than hobbyists. But the Standard comes in at $240. There’s also a free Personal Learning which is “not time-limited” (although I guess there might be a watermark).
Those who want to do real-time piratey ‘life on the ocean waves’ stuff, without the tedium of waiting 1,000 years for a render from the likes of Vue, might like to try their ocean shaders…
It also has a physics engine. No toon cel-shading, sadly — but they’re anticipating a plug-in store at some point in the future.
