Entering a New Dimension

The initial vision for bHopper was always a demake of the 1999 Midas Interactive game BHunter. It was a game that used its rudimentary 3D to create a world that was much more than the sum of its parts. 

As primitive as the BHunter graphics look now, they were still full 3D. My vision was more like Grand Theft Auto 1 or 2 - vehicles, weapons, set dressing, effects, and more would be done as 2D sprites. Buildings and larger environmental features would be done using GDevelop's simple 3D shapes, mostly by mapping images onto cubes. This would be easier for me to execute, since it's been easily 15 years since I've regularly done work in 3D. And that was in 3DS Max, which I absolutely wouldn't be using - in part because of the cost, and in part because of the secondary mission of this project, which is to use free and open-source tools as much as possible.

The last time I meaningfully tried to use Blender was probably 20 years ago. And at that time it looked like this: 

I had feelings about the interface, the general hostility of hiding so many functions behind hotkeys instead of contextual menus, the ever-expanding complexity and scope of the project. But I simply wasn't going to get the game to where I wanted and needed it to be if I didn't learn some 3D modeling. 

I started with a predictable starting point: Blender Guru's donut tutorial. It did what it claimed it would: got me used to a lot of the tools and principles. And I had a lot of fun with it.

But game assets were different. Particularly retro-styled low-poly ones that needed to work within a lightweight open-source game engine. It would be less about vibes and sculpting and sprinkes, more about pushing and pulling specific faces and vertices. I tried to start small and simple, by replacing an asset that was desperate to be freshened up: the delivery marker. 

See, limiting yourself to the built-in GDevelop 3D boxes, well, limits you to the built-in GDevelop 3D boxes, which means that things start looking awfully boxy. A more cylindrical delivery area struck me as appropriate - I'm thinking of GTA 3 here, where your objective marker was a ring of light that shone upwards. Cylinders are also basic 3D primitives, which means that it would likely be easy to add. I made a cylinder, tapered it a little, deleted the top and bottom faces, and using the same noisy gradient texture as the box in the game with a little bit of emission, I came up with this:

To my surprise, Blender natively supports exporting to GLB format, which is the format GDevelop needs to ingest 3D models. And... well... it was that easy. 

Dear reader, it was that easy.

I wasn't ready for it to be that easy. 

Which made me wonder... what else might be that easy? Could I create a 3D version of the hopper, too? 

But I was going to use sprites for the vehicles. 

Wasn't I? 

I'd just do it as an experiment. As a quick exercise to keep using the tools. And maybe I could put it in the promo art and the Steam capsule and the main menu, as a fun little - 

Well. Sure. I needed to consult friend of the site ReddieSculpts to ask why my UV maps were being stupid, but otherwise, I just kind of... made a 3D version of the hopper. The textures were painted at 256x256px in GIMP, both the diffuse and emissive textures. (And they need quite a bit of work, still, but they're there.)

So I had my art. I could import it into GDevelop and drop it into my little menu screen. And as it turned out, GDevelop will happily make the emissive parts of the hopper's texture pop with a bloom filter. With a little 3D elliptical movement behaviour, the hopper would happily hover.

Dear reader, I was once again not prepared for it to be that easy. 

Well, if I had it in the menu, how hard could it be to put the model into the game?

Not hard at all. You can see the 3D versions parkes on the rooftop and the sprite hovering above it. (And the Boca-Cola billboard nearby. Drink Boca-Cola - It's for your mouth!)

I have yet to wire up the controls to the 3D hopper, but there was one more thing to try. 

There is a 3D physics engine. 

Could I - ?

This has unlocked... everything. It's all so much easier than I expected it to be. Difficult, but not nearly the insurmountable task I'd built it up to be in my mind. The lingering hostility towards Blender from 20 years ago is, I am glad to say, unfounded in 2025. There's still a learning curve and I'm going to make mistakes, but I've got some early wins under my belt now, and I've got my excitement and inertia back. 

bHopper is entering the third dimension. I did not expect that to be the outcome of this dalliance with Blender, but here we are. 

I think this is a rare example of when scope creep can be good, actually. I think we're going to end up with a better product with more elegant graphics and immersive physics and gameplay than if I was limiting myself to sprites.