Laika Redux

The original version of Laika was hacked together in a few days in order to gain entry to an open day at one of the bigger games studios in my area. After this, I was then told that to apply for jobs, I'd need to show off the code (being a prospective programmer), so I set about rewriting large sections of the game and porting it from GLUT to SDL. My friend, Ratchet, then posted on here about the game. Now, until recently I'd thought that the current incarnation would be good enough of a demo to get my foot in the door, however, it obviously isn't. This is evident from the fact that I'm still one of the great unwashed and unpaid.

I've recently been learning quite a bit about the programmable pipeline and, actually, looking back at Laika's code I can see why I don't have a job. I've started rewriting the graphics engine (again) and I'm using SFML this time. I'm hoping that by starting a thread here I can receive a bit of feedback about both how to improve the game as it is and, possibly, gain a bit of attention for it. Although it's by no means a revolutionary concept, most people I've shown it to seemed to have quite enjoyed it.

Progress

08/08/10:

I've written some C++ helper classes to wrap functionality for loading/compiling shaders, linking to shader programs and handling vertex buffer objects.
I also have plans for a VertexList class which will manage drawing primitives using a GL_ARRAY_BUFFER and GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER object. Multiple, named attributes will be handled using glVertexAttribArray and automatically-calculated offsets. I'm still trying to decide on a suitable format for the constructor. Perhaps using a std::map?