Sticking with what I know

My choice of Java/LWJGL is not a common one.  Java sucks, its slow, etc.  I know.  I chose Java because that’s what I know the best.  It provides the lowest barrier of entry for me.  I chose LWJGL because its a binding for OpenGL, so I at least have an idea if I ever port.  I am working now on a first-person game that doesn’t really have a lot of direction, but I have gotten the basics programmed:

• I have a working first person camera
• I have a scene file in which I can define lights and objects
• I can read the scene file, render the lights and the objects (just .obj, for now)
• I can move around in my scene
• I use VBOs to render my objects

And that’s about it.  I started working on Animation, but realized I need to focus on the very basic things first such as loading models, rendering their colors/textures/etc, moving around, collision detection, etc, before I go more advanced. Many of you (look at all those readers!) will ask why I don’t use a framework like UDK, etc.  To be honest, I’ve tried, and I just can’t get the hang of it.  It seems completely alien to me and I have no idea what I am doing.  Meanwhile, in my game “engine” that I am working on, I know every aspect of it, what is where, what I need to code, etc.

 So it makes things easier for me to code and understand.  I have complete control.  I like that.  In UDK I just feel like a designer, which is not really what I am.  I love that every line I have written myself and I understand (mostly) how everything works.   In the future, I don’t mind expanding past LWJGL though.  I  have used ActiveX, XNA and they are similar and seem powerful, but I run into language barriers there.  So, for now, I’ll stick to what I know.

Diary of Game Developer

I had a huge amount of text here for no reason going into all the gory boring details of my life.  Instead, I replace it with this:  I am writing a game. In LWJGL.  It will be a first person game.  The end-goal is to have  a game where you will concoct various weapons/devices by rummaging through city dumps so you can destroy X amount of large roaming robots.  The engineers who made these robots were just too ambitious and lost control.  Now the robots are destroying the city.  You must stop them.