As some of you may already know I’ve been continuing the development of Glue Editor. Things are coming along nicely as the end of the first iteration approaches. I would like to share with everyone what I have planned for Glue Editor in the coming months and find out if I’m heading in the right direction. Your honest opinion is appreciated 
Motivation
Building a game with Ogre or Mogre has never been an easy task. The Ogre graphics engine provides incredible rendering capabilities and great flexibility to build whatever type of game you can dream of. However, putting together a complete and finished game takes a considerable amount of programming effort “gluing” the graphics engine to physics, sound, GUI, networking and so on. Once all that’s done the various art resources are created such as meshes, textures, sounds and collision shapes.
Many of these resources can be created with your favorite modelling program, paint program or sound generator. Yet, there’s still something missing. Placing all of these resources together into a game could be hacked together in code and exported from modelling programs with a little blood and sweat but it never feels nearly as productive as it could be.
Intention
Glue Editor’s primary purpose is to fill the missing gap. To provide a productive tool to piece together the various resources into levels for your Ogre game projects. Then to be able to save the levels into a file format easily loaded into your game containing the data to let the graphics, physics and sound engines to do what they do best. To help you provide the best interactive experience for your players in the shortest development cycle possible.
I’m developing Glue Editor using an “Agile” approach in my spare time in monthly iterations. At the start of each month I set some goals to achieve during the iteration focusing on what I can do to provide the most value towards the ultimate goal. The main goals of an iteration are called stories and are from the perspective of the user, for example: “As a user I want to be able to rotate objects so that I can make more natural looking scenes”. Then these high level goals are broken down into smaller tasks, prioritised and picked off one by one. At the end of an iteration any half finished features are polished, removed or disabled to get the program ready for a release and/or the remaining work is rolled over into the next iteration.
Results
I’ve made some great progress this month, using the Agile approach and defining some clear goals have really helped focus on the important features and not get distracted by the less important stuff. The project has already come a long way from where I left it a few years ago. I had to pull it apart and put it back together to lay the foundation for new features so many things are still broken. The one question remains, what should I really put my blood and sweat into next iteration?
