New art for AdonthellThere has been slight activity on Adonthell's mailing list: James Nash, an artist of the team, announced some new art to be soon added. Good thing too, considering the graphical quality of the engine demo game "Waste's Edge" (I'm only 120% sure, but "Adonthell" is the name of the engine and "Waste's Edge" is the title of the small adventure game that often gets served as "Adonthell".)
Waste's Edge, in case you forgot how... classic it looksAdonthell 0.4.0 alpha 2 has been released half a month ago, luckily with build instructions, the INSTALL file directed me to them and I was actually able to build it. Unfortunately it seems to be an engine-only release - I don't see any demo to execute. FIFE (which by the way recently switched to the LGPL) at least includes it's tropical island tech demo.
Speaking of adventures/RPGs and their engines, Steve commented on the open source adventure games situation. Compared to RTS or FPS, the situation is: "there aren't any." At least not of the point-and-click kind of type. Steve says the reason is that making adventure games isn't fun - since the story/surprise/suspension of your work won't work on you.
There is however the Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine, an apparently simple-to use visual interactive fiction engine. It sure is 
Back on the adventure games issue: Tranberry proposed, that instead of creating games, game developers should create game frameworks for non-developers. O_o Of course it makes sense from the perspective, that it's no fun to know the story of the game for the game programmer, but on the other hand someone will have to know the whole story and won't be able to play the game as a player, this way or another. I think he's correct though that the role of the game designer should be separated from the role of the programmer for great justice better game quality. Excluding some naturals I guess.
BTW: Tranberry is the guy, who created the friggin-awesome looking current style for the JCRPG blog (see old style for comparison.)
Ulroth Axe, one of the kick-ass awesome models from OpenFragAgain back to the game design issue: Creating the story and assembling the game's code and media should be done in a specific order. I am the fan of the "functionality-first, story-second"-method. OpenFrag's dev team is walking such a way at the moment, as I was told on #openfrag yesterday. In the beginning of the project, there were discussions about the story, but it became too complicated and now they concentrate on getting the orcs and swords and the slaughtering and bloodsheds to work and will worry about story later! Awesome!
Metropolis game menuPS: Something seems to be happening regarding Micropolis' port to *nix systems... But I'm not sure what. I can start the game menu, but fail to actually play it. See screen.
Where are my buildings?PPS: Anonymous just told me to deactivate NumLock, which helped :) But I am unable to see anything besides the map. O_o
PPPS: Gah, all the info is in the comments, if you want it. ^^
6 comments:
ABout Micropolis : have you tried turning off your num lock ?
Cheers. :)
neat! but where is everything? O_o I only see buses on naked land..
Oh, and just in case, you might also want to check out the updated source code or prepackaged debs around micropolis-forums :
http://micropolis-forums.org/viewtopic.php?t=5
I haven't checked them out myself, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work...
Guess I didn't forget anything this time, I'll stop spamming around. Have a nice day (and thanks for this blog ^^)
You are shouldering this great q! we love you ;P Jumping around in a circle singing: "I'm in a blog post, I'm in a blog post!". good info on the "girlie" games too, never think everyone know of the things you do.
About adventure games:
First of all there's AGS which has been used to create a huge number of games, some of very high quality. The engine doesn't seem to be open source. Perhaps the author could be convinced to release the source code, or a remake of the engine could be made (similar to SCUMMVM).
Then there's the Sludge engine, which was used to create the game Out of order. The engine is not yet ported to Linux, but it's open source (link here) and they say it runs under WINE.
Finally there's Wintermute Engine which looks very promising. Not open source (yet) but free for both hobby and commercial use. The author says that there is no source code license available at the time being, indicating that he might release the source code at some point in the future, if he finds a suitable license.
Also check out the Wikipedia pages
A lot of text based adventure games exist as well. Open source engines/systems include the popular TADS and INFORM systems.
OpenFrag looks awesome! O_O I'm gonna keep an eye on that. Another FPS engine I like is Sauerbraten.
Post a Comment