The Beginning of the ProjectSo, now that I am dedicated to developing my first title, I will be working to put together a somewhat conservative but realistic schedule. I am usually pretty good at estimating how long it will take to perform a certain task, but the difficulty comes in when determining what line items to have in the schedule.Basic Project InformationThe project working name is going to be:

HydroGen

It isn't all that fancy, but it fits to the story line pretty good. I'll be presenting parts of the story in the coming months, but I want to keep the majority of it under wraps until I am much further along in development.

The game is going to be based on my game engine 'Heiroglyph'. The engine was developed primarily as a graphics test bed, but has evolved into quite a good little engine encompassing the following areas:

1. Graphics - implemented using Direct3D 9
2. Input - implemented using Direct Input
3. Sound - implemented using Direct Sound
4. Physics - implemented using PhysX from Ageia

These components will remain as they are until I shift the engine over to DX10 - which may not happen for quite a while (quite possibly years!). Also, PhysX is now royalty free, so it makes sense to use it for physics (since its the only dedicated hardware accelerated API). Essentially all of the development work on the engine is complete, and it has been used to produce eight different projects over the past year or so - which gives me some confidence that this will work out well for a commercial game. Of course, there will be robustness improvements over the course of this project, but should not be anything major.

With this in mind, most of the scheduling milestones will likely revolve around the actual game application instead of developing new technology for it. This should help in reducing the project duration. The graphics framework is set up to scale with the hardware of the host computer, so there should be plenty of graphical goodness in the final version.

Once I have my schedule finished up, I will probably post it at the top of the journal - this seems to be the tradition around here, so I won't buck the trend...