We decided to start working on Pod & Rodney in the middle of July of 2009. We have a back log of blog posts archiving some of our woes, decisions, and excitement. A lot of the blog posts are just us sometimes discussing how we have something coming or that we should post on the blog more often. We've changed our attitude a lot since then.
A few days ago, we came to the conclusion that we didn't actually get a development pipeline solid until about late April of 2010. I wouldn't say we wasted any time up to this point, but we definitely learned some valuable lessons along the way.
We started out with a lot of ambition. We love video games and we really wanted to make one of our own. At the time, we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. We had no idea where to start, and we had only dreamed about developing a game up until this point. So we made some classic mistakes right off the bat. One of them was that we tried to develop our own game engine, which was going to be called the "Siege Engine". It was a really catchy name, and we had some cool plans for it. Ultimately it became far more of a challenge than we had anticipated, and we simply couldn't finish it properly within a timely manner. Mostly due to us not being able to efficiently program any sort of graphical rendering code.
To solve our rendering issue with the Siege Engine, we decided to get a pre-made graphics engine called Ogre. Ogre did exactly what it was supposed to, but it didn't change the fact that we were still programming everything else from scratch. So after a few weeks of very little progress, we switched again.
Panda 3D enters the scene. It was a full packaged game engine, and the demos made it's capabilities look promising. It was also free, since it was developed for/by students (Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center). A game engine being free of charge is rare for anything worth using, so this was a nice start. The biggest problem that Panda 3D presented us was that it used DirectX based rendering, and since we develop our visual game assets using Maya, an OpenGL based 3d development tool, we had to come up with some pretty crazy ways of converting OpenGL files to DirectX. This was like sorcery. We felt like we were literally trying to solve the problem of changing lead into gold. Eventually, after a lot of time spent, we got it to work, but our development pipeline for moving graphical assets to the engine was a total mess by this point. So we started to lose momentum.
We weren't sure what we were going to do, things were functioning, but the sheer amount of work to create such simple results was monstrous. We started hunting around for professional game engines, deciding we were going to bite the bullet and pay for one. We had come across Gamebryo, but the price-tag was ridiculous for our first project. After a lot of hunting we eventually found our princess, our holy grail, our magical solution.
In mid April 2010 we found the Unity game engine. Unity does everything we needed it to. It compiles the game to multiple platforms with the click of a button, it accepts DirectX and OpenGL graphical assets, and it's license price is very reasonable. Anytime we come to a potential hiccup in our development pipeline, we test it in Unity and quickly work everything out. This program, and the people that made it, provide such a phenomenal service that our inspiration and momentum has been soaring. We have developed so much in the past two months, thanks to this game engine.
I've seen our game come to life, and soon any followers of the blog will too. The ambition we started with in the beginning is back and bigger than ever. This is a very exciting time for the Pod & Rodney team, and we've fallen in love with the process because of it.
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