I still use blender 2.49b for game dev, it's just easier to control. the interface and hotkeys are uniform in all windows, so selection, panning, rotation, scaling, Zoom, you name it, becomes easier. I prefer it for texture and UV mapping, rigging, and modelling. and I'm used to it's logic bricks and python 2.
you can do just about anything with it.
there's just a few bugs you need to work around, like the bug where logic bricks randomly disappear when you have XX number of logic bricks (I think it's 50) in a logic stack, so you need to use methods to build your game objects with minimal logic bricks in the stack, or be able to split it to multiple objects and instead of linking; use communication via networkmessage actuators so the logic bricks are in different stacks.
yeah the built-in real time in-game shadows suck. but if you're clever you can make your own raytraced shadows using a shadow scene and the videotexture render to texture (Alpha channel 0) method.
Oh, and Do Not trust blender's Float Properties!!!!!! they smoke metal-crack. something as simple as 1.234 will be like 1.2000000000000000094, so save floats as strings.
one more thing to be aware of with blender for game dev is it's high overhead which eats into the scene budget. so, on my old laptop with 2GB memory I could do like 15,000 polygons in game without crashing, but if I got too close to 20,000 that's a blender crash. now I have 16 GB ram so things are alot better, I did a game simulation with 400,000 polygons and it was kinda the limit. if there were more interactions and animations then 400k polygons would be a bit much and crash. I'd suggest like 15k per 2GB ram, so for me that's 120k polygons max scene budget with animated characters and video textures etc. just watch your memory usage and you'll be fine.
I have yet to finish any games in it, but I'm getting there. game menus are a chore (if you feature-creep in a settings menu like I do). and naturally any game you make is in source and if someone has the correct blender version they can open it and modify it, so you'll need a good anti-modification license like "the models textures, characters and premises in this are owned by me and are not released under the GPL, but instead under this personal use license" - you can do that legally to prevent hard work being stolen, you just can't prevent the actual blender code itself from being modified and released for free (so you need to specify whats not under GPL that you made and tell them they are responsible for separating the game files and data from blender before releasing the blender software on it's own per the GPL).
but today I'll probably get back to rigging low poly fingers on my female model (I did the index finger and thumb wonderfully, but took innaddequate notes on my methods to do it (and took a long dev break..), and now I'm having to relearn what I did.) making a game character with posable fingers takes math. nothing too hard, just 90 degree rotation math and % rotation math to compare weights (if you want it to behave right).
For notes on rigging, I got the old Blender MaidSan model, it's basically a good example of auto IK and pointers. for shoulders I use auto IK and bone loops (it complains that the bones are in a parenting loop but it still works lol), that's mainly so I can have a bone control the pectoralis muscles and point at the joint where the shoulder bone connects to the bicep bone.
rigging takes practice, there's no 1 best way to rig; different joints need different methods, like in each finger alone I have 3 different joint styles so it bends right with minimal bones for a game model. (otherwise you'd need to have bones to represent muscles as well, the goal is to try to get away without having to do that, unless you're rendering an animation).
learning any software takes a long time, this is another reason I stuck with 2.49b, I wanted to actually learn how to make a full game in it (rather than hopping from version to version and having to relearn the wheel only to have them remove the GE entirely by the time I was any good at it).
but yeah, if the new stuff is too difficult to work in, then downgrade to an older version.
