Re: [Adonthell-general] [Fwd: Re: community ad]

[cirrus]

I am a complete twat!
Here's the txt

        -James
-- 
   ___    ___  ___       ___ 
  /    / /__/ /__/ /  / /__                 Reg. Linux User #148821
 /___ / / \  / \  /__/ ___/@linuxgames.com  www.twiddles.com
                                            adonthell.linuxgames.com

Developing Adonthell


-- in the beginning --

Adonthell was originally two seperate projects. Kai Sterker had begun work on 
Adonthell, an RPG game inspired by the Ultima games. He had developed a 
dialogue system and had written the main storyline for the game. Meanwhile 
Alexandre Courbot had started his own project which went by the name of 
Genescroll. Alex was inspired by the Final Fantasy series (the old 2D ones, 
that is) and had a working mapengine. Alex was joined by James Nash who begun 
do design the graphics but other than that these were still more or less 
private projects with virtually no audience.

-- hello world! --

Both Kai and Alex were using the GPL license for their code but without 
publicity they couldn't catch the attention of other developers to help them. 
Therefore both applied for hosting at www.linuxgames.com to put up a website 
and get some attention. It was Al Koskelin from linuxgames who suggested that 
the two ought to consider merging their projects. This made good sense as 
Adonthell had a story, a dialogue system and no graphics, whereas Genescroll 
had no story, no dialogues but working graphics. And so Adonthell bsorbed 
Genescroll and the joint Adonthell site was launched at linuxgames.

The site launch coincided with the 0.1 release of the game and within days our 
download counter was well into the hundreds and several people had mailed 
asking to join. Initially we let anyone come and help. A mailing list ws set up 
at onelist.com to let the developers discuss their ideas. As the code began to 
grow and more people joined in it became difficult to coordinate the work and 
integrate new code. Fortunately we discovered sourceforge.net. They provided us 
with a CVS which was invaluable for the programmers and gave us ad-free mailing 
lists :).

-- more than just programming --

A good computer game doesn't rely exclusively on good code though. Graphics, 
music and above all gameplay are essential ingredients. Unfortuntely it doesn't 
take long realise how many independent open source game developers have 
neglected this fact. So many open source games lack imgination and/or quality 
multimedia. The games are no doubt made by talented programmers but talented 
programmers are rarely good artists, musicians and story writers too (Kai 
Sterker is an exception here though - he's a great programmer AND a great 
writer!).

This is an aspect where Adonthell has been extremely fortunate. We have a 
dedicated musician, Joseph Toscano (of Tuxracer fame), a dedicated story and 
dialogue writer, Mike Nieforth (but Kai and Josh Glover help in that area too 
as well as program!) and 2 dedicated artists, Benjamin Walther-Franks and 
James. It is this multitude of talents that makes Adonthell stand out as one of 
the really interesting open-source games.

-- organisation --

Don't think that everyone who wants to join your project will be as good or 
devoted as our core members though. We have had people who have joined, worked 
on some code and then left without a trace leaving the others to try and make 
sense of their unfinished work. This has forced us to introduce a policy 
whereby wannabe programmers must submit several patches to prove their skill 
and enthusiasm before we give them write access to our CVS.

Funnily enough we get the opposite case sometimes too. We have had people 
submit fantastic music or graphics asking if we liked it and if they could join 
- yet as soon as we give them an enthusiastic 'yes' we never hear from them 
again! Very strange but true.

As Adonthell grows and becomes ever more complex it gets harder and harder to 
explain the workings of the code or graphics to newcomers. The solution is good 
documentation. It sounds obvious, but when you startworking with just 2 or 3 
people where everyone knows everything it's the last thing you think of! Our 
programmers now use doxygen to document their work and the graphics artists 
will be doing the same in the near future.

-- working as a team --

Now that you've had an insight on how we started and how people get involved 
you are probably wondering how we all get along. Well, we do just fine! In the 
entire history of the project we have had virtually no arguments or upsets 
amongst team members. When new ideas are proposed they are discussed in a 
civilised fashion and some kind of agreement is always reached. Perhaps this 
works so well because everyone is only interested in making a great game - 
there's no money behind it, no deadlines. We do it as a hobby and we do what's 
best for the game!

Without wanting to sound cheesy it's worth noting that several of the 
developers have gotten to know each other through Adonthell and become friends 
which improves the working atmosphere even more. We have lready organised 2 
meetings for or European embers and it looks like it will become an anual 
thing! All in all working on Adonthell is a highly enjoyable and rewarding 
experience. Surely the same is true of many other open-source projects so we 
can only recommend you give it a try!