It's summer, and for university students like me, that means a near 5 month summer holiday. To keep myself interested and productive I've decided to undertake a number of large projects. The first two are now complete (making a chainmaille vest, which took somewhere between 50 and 100 hours, and making enough jewellery stock to last the tourist season), so it seems like a good time to start the third: a game engine and accompanying game. I'm giving myself about two months to get something done, working roughly from 9 until 6, with a couple of big breaks in between. The problem is I'm not really sure how much I can get done in that time, and hence what to aim for.
C++ is new to me (I've only used Java and C# in the way of OOP up until now), but I'm an extremely quick learner so that shouldn't be too much of a problem. I got myself a bunch of books, including of course the excellent GCC4, and have read through them, so I have some idea about the systems I'm going to be implementing. The question is how much can I reasonably get done in two months? Aside from just doing this for fun and experience, I'm going to be having interviews next year as my degree program features a year working (I'm doing CS, so not necessarily the games industry); it would be nice to have something to show.
The game I'd like to do would play a little like Alien Swarm, with a fixed top down third person camera, but the primary gameplay mechanic would be light. The game engine would therefore have to be capable of doing all kinds of light based things including reflection and refraction, which sounds like it could possibly quite hard to write efficiently. The light is for gameplay, not looks, so it wouldn't have to look amazing. Anyway, does this sound like something that I'd be able to make a working demo out of in a 6 weeks, or am I aiming too high?
C++ is new to me (I've only used Java and C# in the way of OOP up until now), but I'm an extremely quick learner so that shouldn't be too much of a problem. I got myself a bunch of books, including of course the excellent GCC4, and have read through them, so I have some idea about the systems I'm going to be implementing. The question is how much can I reasonably get done in two months? Aside from just doing this for fun and experience, I'm going to be having interviews next year as my degree program features a year working (I'm doing CS, so not necessarily the games industry); it would be nice to have something to show.
The game I'd like to do would play a little like Alien Swarm, with a fixed top down third person camera, but the primary gameplay mechanic would be light. The game engine would therefore have to be capable of doing all kinds of light based things including reflection and refraction, which sounds like it could possibly quite hard to write efficiently. The light is for gameplay, not looks, so it wouldn't have to look amazing. Anyway, does this sound like something that I'd be able to make a working demo out of in a 6 weeks, or am I aiming too high?