That weird Blender Game Engine thing

[Luftmensch]

I don't know if any of you use Blender (actually I know for a fact Brendon Chung does but w/e) but I kind of follow it's development from a distance, and the one thing that is always weird to me is its built-in game engine. It's such a weird bastard project. Sometimes I hear of people using it for like installation projects, like some interactive show at a planetarium, but besides that it just seems to be this weird platform for people to make

that they never finish. I listen to the Blender Podcast, where basically two of the main sort-of-full-time programmers talk about what sort of development and community news is going on with Blender, and the game engine is always this weird aside, "oh yeah and I guess there's the game engine too but I dunno what's going on there..."

So yeah, I'm curious about what folks know or think about it. I just don't really get it, though I guess it's kind of cool that young programmers are adding features and I guess learning software development on it. Also recently I found a game that actually looks good and well-polished, and the guy who makes it doesn't sound like a completely inarticulate mumbling nerd which gives some sort of authority to his work. I'll post a video below. Do people use this? Do people even care?

[Jason Bakker]

I've been learning Blender recently in order to create simple models for use with Unity - I've never actually used the game engine side of Blender. At the Melbourne Global Game Jam there's usually a Blender dev (I think) that makes games using it (ie. whirlstrom, GGJ 2012), but that's all I've heard about games developed with it.