Around the end of September, I decided to revisit my 3D Great Hall demo (the one I submitted as my creative sample, and showed the other week in Seminar). Some say I should abandon it and use a prebuilt engine, so that I can create a game more quickly. That makes a lot of sense, and yet...as much as I deny it, and as much as I want to do the creative over the technical...I guess I just like programming. It's funny though, I used to work as a programmer and do 3D art & video in my spare time. And now that I'm doing creative stuff full time, I'm programming as a hobby!
So anyway, the engine. I've code-named it Tantallon, after the castle that inspired the great hall portrayed in my demo. I'm going for a highly-organized, fully object-oriented approach. I'm writing it in C++, with OpenGL for graphics, and DirectX for sound and input. The work's going slowly, but it is, after all, a hobby, and if I decide I want to rapidly prototype a full-fledged game, I'll consider an alternative approach!
For anyone who's interested in this type of thing, check out these websites for some cool tutorials:
www.gametutorials.com
nehe.gamedev.net