Deus Hex was supposed to be a round base strategy game. It was developed by a team of three as part of our studies course “Programming II”. One of our specifications was using the C# 2D framework SFML or it’s underlying OpenGL wrapper OpenTK. We decided to make our game 3D, which meant writing an engine ourselves using OpenTK.

Writing the engine was part of my tasks. To accomplish it I used the video tutorials from ThinMatrix. Unfortunately for me he was using the Lightweight Java Game Library ( lwjgl ) instead of the C# wrapper OpenTK, which meant I had to translate his tutorial. Because of a few mismatches in version, naming and structure of the two wrappers, I had to additionally consult the documentation, other tutorials and stack overflow. In the end I managed to create a working render engine to render the models by our Artist, Alexander Linke. The .obj loader (and later the .fbx loader) used for that were made together with him using the Pair programming technique. Because of the complexity in writing an engine by ourselves, especially in the short timeframe of a few days/weeks, we used Unity for our future projects.

Besides the render engine and model loaders, I wrote a hexagon grid manager following Amit Patels, aka Red Blob Games’, article “Hexagonal Grids”. Furthermore I worked on a mouse picker, as well as an A* path finding algorithm for commanding troops, which didn't look all that impressive considering the lack of an animation engine. Finally I also made a simple terrain generator and camera controller.

Considering the complete lack of experience at that time (2nd semester), the rather short project duration, actual gameplay, and finally a grand oversetting of goals, I was very proud with not only the result but also the project itself. This project had the most learning to duration ratio of all courses of my Game Development Study at the SRH Heidelberg. A fact even more worth mentioning when considering it did not even get a grade, only a checkmark if sufficient.

Date: July 2017