Day 47 : Migration

This is the first post of the Archangel Game's development blog. But it is actually day 47 of the project. The project was started on January 15th, 2006 but I have decided just now to start a development journal. I will document here the different milestones and main events that will happen during the development. I do it mainly for myself, to keep track of how long different steps in the process have taken, and help me to better my abilities to evaluate future time-budgets on game development.

This is how the project started:

I had spend more than a year trying to make a game with the Torque Game Engine, but it would always seem I couldn't go anywhere with it unless I went exactly the way the engine wanted me to go. After giving it one last frustrating shot over the christmas holidays, I decided to give up on it and move on. As long as I was switching engine, I decided to also create a new game concept. And so the Archangel Game started. The Archangel Game is just the name of this blog, the game has a working title which is not yet public (because it could hold on to the end).

The first month and a half of the projects were created using the freeware edition of the Dark Game SDK. And although I can readily recommend it for novice programmers and prototypers, at the end of those 45 days I stumbled upon many limitations and some nasty bugs that prevented me from carrying on with it. And so yesterday, on day 46, after some 18,000 lines of code, I decided to start migrating from the Dark Game SDK to the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine, better known in the community as OGRE. That is the story so far...

I am now 24 hours into the porting and things are, I think, running smoothly. After 6 or so hours of work, I've completely "unplugged" the Dark Game SDK from the game. I also, at the same time, ported the game from VC6 to Visual C++ 2005 Express, which created another slew of compiler errors. I'm happy to report that things are now back to compiling as they were. But now I have a game with no engine. Nothing's visible, I didn't even dare to run it. Tomorrow, I start plugging in the OGRE engine. I have an E.T.A. of between 2 weeks and 1 months 1/2. That because I've never done such a thing and I don't know yet how OGRE works.

I've spend a few hours with the OGRE docs and so far I'm in love. Let's see how all this holds up.