With some help from a good friend, I took my first steps into game-making using C++ last night. I used a graphics engine called Ogre3D and tried to mimic a game I started making in Dark Basic Pro a few weeks ago. To my astonishment, within a few hours I'd managed to replicate the basic layout of the game using tools which cost absolutely nothing!
Firstly I'd really like to thank my friend for all his patience and help - without him I wouldn't have known where to start!
Secondly - I'd like to list all the tools I used for this first step.
- Visual Studio Express 2005 - a free C++ IDE and compiler by Microsoft.
- Ogre3D - the 3D Engine. It can handle OpenGL and DirectX, making it (in theory) cross-platform.
- Blender - A free 3D Modelling application.
- Textures included with Dark Basic Pro - although DBP isn't free itself, I already own it so for me the textures were as good as free for this project.
That's pretty much it!
The game I was making in Dark Basic Pro was a simple game where you had a random set of boxes on a "map" and you couldn't see your enemy unless you had direct line-of-sight. This game also had network capability which I'm not even going to consider touching yet until my C++/Blender foundations are more secure.
Below I attach some screenshots showing the progression of my learning...