Quote:Original post by The C modest god

Quote:Original post by superpig
A networked 3D shooter or something? Sure, perfectly doable in a year.

You think?
How much time and how many people worked on battlefield 1942 for example

I don't know how much time or how many people were involved in the creation of that game. But I'm sure that it would take you more than a year to achieve this by yourself. Such a game requires more ressources that one person can provide during that period of time.

For a quick estimation... I met a guy that had a small studio and they had a team of 20 programmers and the developpement took 2 years (say about 48-50 weeks of work a year) it means 80000 man hours. Now say that you want to accomplish this (programming only) by yourself it means that you will have to work a bit less than 1600 hours a week (80000/52) over a complete year... and I didn't mention anything about overtime and those who had to come to work the week ends and other "free" hours. Then you have a game that you can't play because there is no art, no characters, no maps... So this is a lot of work for one person ;). If it was the kind of quality that you wanted to achieve... you might want to think smaller than that... unless you have 200 hours to put on that project every day for a year.

Otherwise you could think smaller... so now it all depends on how much time someone wants to work on such projects and if you can team with other people. It doesn't need to be as optimized and polished as games that you would sell. Since this is something to put on your CV to show you completed a project and can work with 3D API you can cut corners... don't support the newest video cards features, the artwork doesn't need to be extremely good quality.

If you can, I would suggest you to use a free/open engine. I had a course in which we had to make two games as homeworks during the semester, a MUD and a 3D game. For the 3D game we used an opensource engine and that really helped a lot mostly because it was already developped and tested (and maintained by a community). Try to use as much as possible third party libs... in an efficient way (if it takes too much time too learn it than to develop it... you shouldn't use it). We had 1 month to show something playable to the teacher (2 month for the complete project). So we had a first person game where you had to find cubes in a map and to shoot them as fast as possible. This is what we had time to achieve in 2 month with all the work needed using (and learning) an open source engine (3d modelling of maps, guns+hand, sounds and music, programming and all the artwork needed for the menus and others...).

We were 3 working for 2 month (plus the homeworks needed for the other courses that I'm sure you'll get too) and we achieved something that is really really far from a commercial game (and one was really experienced in 3D modelling).

Usually those school projects are there so you have something to show to employers and prove them you can actually be good to something so using third party libs will show them you can work with the code you didn't wrote. Also, it might be a good idea to team with others to make such a project. Making yourself the project manager would be something interresting to add on your CV too.

JFF

EDIT:Also that project helped me get a job in the industry.

thanks for all the advice. I was thinking it's impossible too. I'm actually to focus more towards my planning & design than I were on the programming part, so there has to be atleast some chunk of work in order for me to showcase.

how bout, designing a game engine? with some simple design just to compliment the game engine, enough to show how the game engine works.

Quote:Original post by Takaloy

Quote:Original post by Thevenin
PONG; THE MMORPG! NOW WITH 3D GRAPHICS

??

Why not try something unique; something that doesn't require an armada of graphics artists?

I've never used another game engine before, is it difficult to implement another's game engine into mine?

I like your idea. I think I'll go with the smell thingy, sounds like a game I'd want to play!

Quote:Original post by Takaloy
I've never used another game engine before, is it difficult to implement another's game engine into mine?

It is as hard as to learn it and make a wrapper for it. So I'd stick with learning it. We worked with crystalspace at school and didn't really like it, mostly because we often found "todos" in the documentation. So from my experience I would say that it's not really hard to learn an engine if you have all the documentation for it. Also, if you use another game engine, look at how big the community looks like and how much feedback it is possible to get from it (look in the forums specific for these engines). That way you make sure that you won't be stopped because you don't know how to use it.

If you make your own engine... the only way to prove that it works would be to have a game for it so you'll end up making the engine and a game. I also would suggest you focus more on some part like particle systems, an audio library or a rendering engine. Using an already made and tested engine will save you time and have more time to work on the game and you won't need to learn a 3D API and all the concepts needed to build a game engine.

Define what you want to make in the beginning and try to stick to this as much as possible this will help you fit in the one year requirement. I suggest you make a concept for a game, a story, design the gameplay, draw sketches of what you what to make and finally make minimized version of that.

JFF

Take a look at the Torque Game Engine. Great client/server architecture as well.

thanks for all the advices, where can I find Torgoe / Orge game engine? What game engine would you think will be the best for me? Hopefully not too complicated but sufficient depth for my application (which at this point still deciding).