Archive for February, 2009
The only thing better than starting small is starting smaller
by m64 on Feb.18, 2009, under Possibilities
Hey there fellow free gamedevs. Sorry for the delay, but previous week at my studio culminated in a Friday all night crunch followed in my case by some really nasty flu and this did not help me write an article. The atmosphere around commundos has cooled down and it might be for the better as the flu has drained all my weekly enthusiasm reserves and some design decisions are difficult to make without it.
Today I want to talk about another idea for improving open source game development process. It is not exactly tied to commundo, but I think the two ideas can reinforce each other so I would like to employ it to start the first commundo. Sharing a world is a way of cooperation between several game projects. Therefore it cannot function properly without an actual game(s) participating in it and pushing its adoption. Now a shared world is most useful for commercial style non-casual games that actually have the ability to present worlds to its players.
Commercial style games are big and complex almost by definition and so they will take a lot of time to implement. We don’t have that much time. We also refuse to make simple games instead (casual… meh). The only other option is to make the games small. Or even smaller. Therefore I would like to propose ultraepisodic games. Ultraepisodic games would work a lot like normal commercial episodic games, for example “Sam & Max”, only more episodic – each episode should be prepared and released within a month or even less, adding perhaps some additional preparation time before new seasons. Because teams working on FOSS games are much smaller than their commercial counterparts the episodes would also be much smaller, on the scale of a single level – hence the term ultraepisodic. I also think it would be benefiting to be able to make the new episodes even more frequently than the commercial games do – with a dedicated team, established world lore and asset repository two week time frame may be possible. To put the long story short, if the commercial episodic games are like comic books, then ultraepisodic games should be like webcomics.
Update on commundos and spam war
by m64 on Feb.04, 2009, under Uncategorized
Just a quick update on what is going on. I am having hard time at work, so I probably will not post any longer update until weekend. The shared world idea has been named “commundo” from latin “commūnis mundus”, or shared world. There is an ongoing discussion about possible settings for the first commundos at FGD forums if you have not already joined it, you might consider doing so. Now some may worry that such discussions with dozens of ideas going into different directions can disperse the effort that should be focused on the creation of the first commundo, but I would never call a discussion harmful. We need to consider all the options before making a decision. Another thing – if you have not noticed some time ago I have added a Creative Commons license widget to the blog – all published materials are covered by CC-BY-SA.
And now an important announcement – we are getting a spam flood in the comments. Therefore I am introducing some more strict filtering rules and this may go as far as manually moderating some of them, so don’t be surprised if yours is not published immediately.
