I decided at the last minute that I wanted to try my hand at straight LWJGL and 3D (which I have never done before).  This was probably a mistake.  Normally I have Slick2D to help with the heavy lifting.

So after three hours of fiddling with OpenGL settings, I finally have TTF text on the screen as well as a first person camera.  Woo!

Results:

The font (Fifteen Okay) is a freeware font I found online.   I hope we aren’t expected to make our own fonts from scratch.