Quote: "Total time approx: 570 hrs, or 24 solid days. And my sore eyes confirm this."
I probably got you beat there. I just mess around with DBP making a quasi 3rd/1st person shooter.
It's like Goldeneye64, except when outside of aiming mode you are 3rd person... oh just like Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
I started in 2002 with DBC and in about 2005 migrated to DBP. Development isn't at all serious and I often go long periods of time without touching it. In some cases weeks or months. It's like playing a video game, and I add little bits every now and again. I revise parts that aren't that good also. Also I learned a ton about performance optimization techniques.
Because it's so far along it's basically a full game. Sometimes I just turn it on and play for an hour or two.
I've also noticed that from playing with DBP this long, I can go back to early levels and see some of the design mistakes I made, or the massive improvements.
Character Improvements Over The Years:
In the image above you can see the first character looks butt ugly. The very first attempt at modelling from scratch with a hand painted texture. That lasted about a few days. Then I figured out how to add photographic elements into the textures to make them better. It still takes a lot of Photoshop work, but I got much much better. Also faces look kinda creepy if you just copy peoples faces, so overlapping multiple faces + a ton of Photoshopping works best.
The body starts segmented and moves into a solid flow, the face and hair get better. Clothing is completely dynamic.
I should also add, with some hypocrisy, I see a lot of 3D modelling attempts that have awful proportions like massive legs or shoulders that make the characters look cheaply made. So I always tried to make things look realistic or better.
I don't spend a lot of time on DBP but since it's been a long time I'm probably at least at 1000 hours of development time. It could even be double that.
I never included a log other than a changelog. It amazes me to look back at the big improvements that were made, like Ai, Ai pathing (so they can hunt), sound system, level transitions, scripting, etc.
I'd say at the moment I'm looking into Shader Lighting, and perhaps adding hi-poly hands to all the models.
I hope this is insightful to people.
Edit:
Oh and losing the source code to my level editor was the worst thing that ever happened. It was a page 1 rewrite of the entire editor.
