A week ago I finished a video game project called Crongdor the Barbarian (https://capnramses.itch.io/crongdor) that I've been working on in my spare time since about 2010! It's an absurdly violent, fast-paced action game with my little cartoon drawings thrown into a 3d environment. The name is a mash up of Conan the Barbarian and Trogdor the Burninator. It was going to be a working title, but I kind of got attached to the silliness of it!
The original prototype was written against a graphics engine called Ogre3d, and designed to run on my tiny Asus EEE notebook and be quick enough to write in my spare time. Since then I re-wrote it from the ground up when I was teaching myself OpenGL. I've always wanted to publish a little hobby game that has a price tag, and I think experimenting with an OpenGL e-book gave me a lot of confidence to do that. Right now it's just on little indie site itch.io, but I'm going to try to get it on Steam so that more people see it - why not?
Finishing a video game is extremely difficult - the most work I've ever put into anything. More hours and creativity and self-discipline and tenacity and sacrifice are required than completing a computer science PhD. I'll try to put out some more blog posts describing how I implemented different features, because I think it will be interesting for people to read that are learning OpenGL or programming. It's hard to know in advance where complexity is, and just how much time or fiddling around is involved in different aspects. I also found a lot of shortcuts and broke a lot of the rules that we were taught at college, so that might be amusing too.
The kind of things I might talk about are:
