Ok, so I havent really programmed anything legitimate in about a year now, which means I'm probably rusty. I decided I would start with something small and work my way back up from...ooohh no wait, that would be the logical thing to do. Despite being a programmer, something that requires a lot of logical thinking, my approach to things is fairly illogical a lot of the time. It doesnt mean Im not good at programming, it just means I have a different way of looking at things to other people, which is actually a good thing when you have a problem to solve. ANYWAY! The point is, I dont start small, like ever. If I want to learn something then I jump right in, especially when its stuff I've at least partially covered before
As such, I decided I would make a 3D pool game. It isnt the kind of game I really want to be making, but as someone pointed out, it will demonstrate all the skills I have in a fairly well contained game that is currently among the most popular online games in le world. Given I suffer from scope creep a lot in my own game designs, a game with clear limits is probably a great idea for me.
First I will introduce myself and my 'team'. My name is Amelia, but everyone calls me Mia. I just finished honours at Deakin University and will soon be applying for jobs in the games industry, however this is an issue, since I dont have a portfolio of any kind...The aim of this project is to get my brain working like a programers brain should again. The last year was kind of boring for me, there was a lot of reading and writing to do for my thesis and hardly any programming. I know I could have done it in my spare time, but I got caught up in work and beach and parties...what can I say? I never really had that phase as a teenybopper so I had it when I was 23 instead :P
My objectives here are to make a program that demonstrates my ability to program a short 3D game, implementing basic physics (force, momentum, acceleration, all that other stuff I hate) as well as the super easy stuff like scoring and what not. In addition to this, I plan to make all of the models used in the game environment myself. Why? Because Im also pretty damn good at the design side of games. Thats right, kiddies, Im just that talented ;D
Okay! So thats a very brief introduction to me. Lets move on to my team.
My team is made up of Cody, Logan and Olivia. I rely on them for everything, and unfortunately they often let me down. Olivia is my laptop, I love her dearly, but maybe dont take as much care of her as I should and as a result shes a little worse for ware lately. She is decked out with Visual Studio and 3DS Max, which I will be making the models in. Logan is her older brother and is a desktop PC, who also has both those programs on him. Unfortunately he is out of action at the moment due to a broken CPU fan. Before the accident, he was my number one programming machine, because he has all my 'relax! dont kill anything.' music on him and lacks an internet connection, allowing me to sit and program for hours without the call of the vast interwaves. Lastly, Cody is my external hard drive, tasked with carrying my work so I can take it everywhere safely. Cody also has two personal assistants, Rosie and Crystal; low memory flash drives that back up my important stuff. Yeah, he's kind of a ladies man.
Why do I name my things? Thats an easy one, its so that I can yell at them when they screw me over. My friends know them by name, too, which makes me giggle on the inside.
Okay! So! All the 3D programming I did in uni was based on a framework given to us by the lecturer, but screw that guy, I dont want to use his work. I did consider starting from scratch, but I started reading up on graphics engines and decided that while it would be nice, I kind of wanted a job this side of the next 10 years and thus should find another solution. Which leads me to Ogre3D and Irrlicht. So these are open source engines that exist for the benefit of people like me, who need something done but dont have the time or abilities to create it for themselves completely from scratch. Both these can do DirectX stuff and OpenGL stuff, they both offer light rendering stuff, they both have particle effects and are both written in C++. Both pretty awesome, but I chose Ogre in the end because it offers less. Makes perfect sense, right? Right.
What I mean by offers less is that Irrlicht is a more all round game engine, it can do collision detection and maths functions and is compatible with some other languages too (C#, Java) where as Ogre is made for rendering 3D stuff, thats about all it can do (which is still a god damn lot). So! Since I want to demonstrate my own programming abilities rather than my ability to take advantage of someone elses, I picked Ogre so that I would have to do my own maths and collision detection. Yay for that.
I suppose the first step now that Ogre is downloaded is to get the sdk working with visual studio. First though, it is nandos time!
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