Hello all,
TL;DR -- Want expert advice on how to start with the series and some design guidance.
I have been following HandMadeHero since the start of its announcement some 9 months back. But my circumstances at work werent conducive for me to follow the series until now. But now that I have some time (well after work hours mostly), I want to seriously devote myself to starting the series. I want a make a proper plan and that is where I need some advice.
1) Well I certainly dont want to make a clone of HandmadeHero, but rather I want to learn to design and make my own engine which I can hopefully extend to make my own games. But I remember Casey saying that he wont be covering any 3D sutff or OpenGL or DirectX stuff with HandmadeHero but just a 2D game from scratch.
My question being - I would rather like to incorporate 3D features into it. So what do you guys (Who have some fair idea what has been covered in the stream till now) recommend I do - Should I watch and follow Casey's series from start and practice on HandMadeHero's codebase then I experiment in separate project (but it will be double the amount of work and effort and I am afraid with my job I might loose the vigor) Another option being - I directly try to incorporate the things from Casey's steam and translate into my game code interpretation - Very risky and can get confusing but I guess it will give me a sense of accomplishment as I would be working on my own engine.
I guess, What I am coming at is, asking for guidance and advice of the seasoned programmers - and try to avoid any pitfalls ( ofcourse not that I will absolutely avoid it but no harm in making conscious decision)
2) About design of the 3D engine from this base - If I am not wrong Casey is currently working on the engine and then will move on to game play stuff. Correct me if I wrong, I guess the engine can be extended to have a 3D renderer in place without much change (?) Basically it can act as a engine code, with separate modules which can be for renderer code and physics engine ? What say? (Just trying to visualize road map to a fully featured game engine)
About my background : I was till recently a computer graphics student and now work in the graphics field but not in game development.
Thanks guys for reading.