Ever since I was first exposed to it as a CE undergrad, OpenGL has always intimidated me a bit. I think it’s mostly because of the amount of code it takes to get any output from the damn thing, much less any useful output. Of course, it could just be because my grasp of matrices and linear equations lies somewhere between slippery and non-existent. But I digress…

Despite my aforementioned anxiety, I have a serious need to learn OpenGL backwards and forwards. I wanna write a game. Correction, I wanna TRY writing a game…in 3D…for the iPhone. This combination (along with a lot of others) necessitates learning how to bend vertices to your will. I’ve tried my hand at game programming a couple times. The most recent was writing a Missile Command clone for the Android Developer Challenge. We didn’t win. Apparently they were looking for apps with “features” that were “useful”. Some people are just picky. We did, however, get some good marks from Google for polish and performance afterward. So overall, I’d say it was a great learning experience.

Since then I’ve gotten a bit of Objective-C and iPhone programming experience under my belt from watching the Stanford lectures (which are excellent, by the way) and doing the homework assignments. I also picked up some decent books, which has become something of a ritual prior to starting a new project. But now that I’ve actually started using OpenGL on the iPhone, the task of getting a rendering engine for a game up and running (even a simple one) seems daunting. So…I thought I post a quick shot of some progress. It’s nothing to brag about, but it is progress nonetheless. In the next few months I’ll likely need all the encouragement I can get.