Mixworld

OGRE!

I've been trying to decide my plan of attack for this new version of Duffers for the past few days. My initial thoughts were that I would write most everything from scratch, but since I'm not that experienced with C++ (I've worked with it a bit, even wrote a WinAPI version of Pong), I did a little research and found that the hard stuff (i.e. rendering) could be handled by a nice OOP open source framework called OGRE. It's under the LGPL license, so I don't have to worry about licensing fees. It's also very well written, and I'll have the flexibility to extend it and implement other libraries for sound, input, networking, etc.

The next big step is to document as much of the design as possible. I've learned from my current work project (Adapt 2.0 Content Management System) that pre-planning is essential. We walked into the first Duffers meaning to plan but not actually getting around to it. It wasted a bunch of effort down the road. Since I'm building the engine and have total control over this iteration, laying everything out becomes that much more important.

I've also been thinking about my goals for this project. Basically it comes down to this: I would like to make a decent income from it for at least myself. I don't think that is a lofty proposition. I'm not going to try to pitch it to publishers (though if approached with a favorable deal that allowed me to keep online distribution rights and IP ownership, I would consider it) or try to get it into stores. I'm considering releasing the base client for free, possibly with the editor, and charge for extra content. I'm also toying with the idea of in-game advertising, but that adds a higher level of commercial complexity, so I'm still researching it. My main goal will be to drive traffic to a website project I'm going to be building, and have that be the main source of income. This idea came to me a little while ago, but apparently I'm not the only one.

I figure, the only risk to me is wasting my time which, given the amount of experience I stand to gain from these projects, is minimal. What I stand to gain is the freedom to continue my development goals, and more experience in this crazy world of games.