OSARE will be close to feature complete in Fall 2010.I assume this means that it will be a working action rpg engine with enemies, items and skills, but no plot or story, ready to be turned into a game.
If you feel that you can contribute something matching high quality of this project, check out the tasks page!
Dawn has very nice graphics and a decent demo with items, a fetch quest, enemies and spells. It's hard to beat -- but easy to exploit, due to pathfinding/collision fun stuffs.
Communication seems to work via mailing lists.
There's a little list of things I don't like:
- Slow walking speed (needs a run button)
- Huge sprite masks/collision boxes
- Two very Zelda™/Link®-like looking sprites..
Hero of Allacrost's release policy experiments result to a release early, release often philosophy.
There is a HoA subforum which is visible only to registered users, for discussion of the game's design. I find it irritating that a large part of discussions is hidden from non-registered lurkers, when it might attract participation. I wonder what other's think about such practice, which has also found its place in the DungeonHack project in this subforum, which is used for discussing a mini-plot/'module' called "Spider Forest". Please comment your experiences with partially hiding game dev discussions if you have any.
HoA also has forums that are developer-only, which feels very non-open to me (because it isn't :) ) but on the other hand the project is supposed to be 'closed' in the sense of 'dedicated developers instead of casual contributors'. What do you think about having part of the development hidden unless you 'promise' to become a dedicated developer?
Funnily enough, there are many projects which have 'closed' communication due to the simple fact that there are many users and developers who don't want to use mailing lists (in my opinion they are usually not usable for browsing, google groups should be acceptable for people used to forums, but GNU mailman is horrible in its default state, if you want to have an overview over existing threads.)
Fall of Imiryn: Hardly anything new about it. A few tweaks there and here in the svn.. If someone wants to test this, I'm looking into polishing the game so it can be 'finished' via a 'last' release. It is playable from start to end right now, but might be enhanced with a few content, without breaking any backs or endlessly continuing development. :) (suggestions welcome)
spoilers - tinyogg
The ..weird.. crazy action-RPG Dink Smallwood was released as open source (minus sounds and music) and is being developed as FreeDink.I will try to spend some time for adding sfx to FreeDink - haven't started yet, even though I have quite the plan. I will use a github repository. Of course anybody is welcome to join in and there's probably nobody working on looking for music to add to FreeDink.
Hopefully there will be a 'full' release without missing audio soon.
I don't know why, but I feel that this was the worst post I ever wrote here. Any comments on that statement are welcome! :)
ReplyDeletethose are some mighty good rpg games. i never knew linux had those. looks like my quest for rpg with good story on linux will come to an end in coming years. hey thanks for posting them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the plug qubodup! Yes you're right, my goal is to have enough core features working that development of the first OSARE based game can begin in the Fall. At that point I'll probably be churning out new assets: tilesets, enemies, maps and working on nice-to-have features.
ReplyDeleteLet's have a little rant, shall we? X.org (the thing that makes Linux have graphics) often crashes, when a game force-fullscreens on me. This makes a sad qubodup D:. I wish games would have a 'select your video/audio configuration' window before game start or just start in windowed mode. :)
ReplyDelete==> try running your game in a new graphic console with
$xinit /usr/bin/da_game -- :1
It will run in tty8 in fullscreen
You can switch back to your desktop anytime with ctrl-alt-F7 (and Ctrl-Alt-F8 to go back to gaming) without taking the risk to crash the game or x.org
kheleklad1: thanks a lot! this helps!
ReplyDeleteI'll give a brief response about Allacrost's "private development". (For those who are unaware, I am the founder of Allacrost and lead the project from 2004 until early this year when I let someone else take control. I am still active with the project as a developer/writer).
ReplyDeleteAllacrost has used this development model since our first year. There were a few reasons for doing so, but I won't go into them here unless asked for further detail. But this process worked very well for us for the first four years. We had a lot of solid, regular contributors and our team was quite large. A lot of those people had to leave the project for their own reasons and we've since found it difficult to completely re-staff our team despite numerous efforts. For over a year I believe we've had a "always hire" policy in effect, basically meaning that anyone who says they want to contribute to our project and are serious enough to send in an application get accepted. So really, anyone could get access to the developer forums just by saying they want to help out.
Because our team is much smaller and not as active now, we've moved more and more toward a more open development model. In fact, many of our private forums in the last week have since been deleted and all their contents moved into the public space (it was pure coincidence that this article was released at nearly the same time that we made our development more open).
I don't think there's a "one size fits all" when it comes to game development, open source or not. In fact I credit our closed development period with enabling our team to really focus and get out some great code and content. But I/we are not dogmatic about how we manage our project. We've realized that our old model is no longer working for us, so we're changing the rules to best meet the project's needs. Isn't that the most important thing of all?