A 3D RPG in a Week

You've probably read http://rampantgames.com/blog/2005/04/rpg-in-week.html and thought "wow, not bad!"  Well, I decided to take this challenge with a twist: I'm going to break rule #3 by using a 3D Engine - Ogre.  I think something beautiful could be produced with the technology today (bearing in mind that blog post was written in 2005).

Previous Experience

• First class with honours in BSc Computer Science from School of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton
• Working as an Internet Services Developer for netcraft.com
• A basic understanding of OpenGL and principles of computer graphics
• Winning first place for design at Silicon Valley Comes to Southampton for my game, aehero.co.uk (er, might be down at the moment)
• Making tetris and 3-bit guitar hero in my first year at university
• Messing around with DarkBASIC Professional when I turned 13 and winning a good review in a competition for my entry, CrAzY Snake, for its 'zelda-esque gameplay'.

The Tools
C++ (I would've used Python but I couldn't get PyOgre to work - sad times...)
Ogre (much nicer than coding in OpenGL from scratch)
Git + GitHub

The Rules

• Time to learn Ogre and any additional C++ counts.  Though I'll be saving time by not having to do everything from scratch, I'll also be losing time in learning the quirks of both so I think it evens out.
• No medieval theme - personally, I think something more original could be done!

Why Ogre?
Having looked at other solutions, I felt this one had the best the license (it's MIT so if I decide I want to later sell this as a cool one-off then I don't have to fork out big money for fees) and it has a python interface for it.  It's cross-platform (Linux is my choice of operating system and it is for a number of my friends).  Don't get me wrong, Unity looks awesome and the auto-porting features would be really handy if you're serious about targeting multiple platforms.  On top of that, you can actually do coding (I'd personally feel dirty if I used a point-n-click creator).

Why git?
You know, I'll let you Google this one for yourself.  Git is pretty cool - it does version control pretty darn well (if you've ever worked with CVS, you'll appreciate it more). 

Why did I fail to make an RPG before?
Poor time management, lack of experience, discipline, source control and project planning.  If experience taught me anything, you need these things!  Sure, hacking together is much more fun and is probably more productive than doing management-y things.  But there comes a time when you have to re-evaluate where you are and you need to decide what features are most important for that next alpha/beta release.  I remember spending way too long on features which didn't do much for the game.  I also would start on a project, make some progress, get stuck and then abandon it to start another!

Challenge Accepted!