Overview
This was the first time any of us had gone near a graphics API. It was coursework for the Graphics module in my second year, and the brief was to put a scene on screen in OpenGL without an engine underneath it: a free-flying camera, shaders, lighting and model loading, all written by the three of us.
The work was a loop of researching something, learning it, and trying it out. We got a lot of it wrong on the way — most of those four months went on things that did not work the first time — and kept at it until they did. Looking back, this is the project that pointed me at the rest: it is where building the graphics environment from scratch turned out to be the part I actually wanted to do.