Wograld - our graphics requirements are less demanding

[Lastmerlin]

just some junk of OT (sry):
I agree with the fact that there are too few Open source Diablo like games out there.
Thats why we ( 4 german students including me) are trying to make such a game. The hope is to be able to release a first Demo in ~4-6 weeks. I think we will announce here. I must admit, its our first big project too, but at least we have a lead programmer

@ Jastiv:
If you dont have a lead programmer and no other team members that may take this job then your project is dead. You can find people who contribute graphics, story or programmer who join in to work on specific tasks - but you have to show a lot more interesting stuff for that.

@ Dave:

I don't understand why a good game programmer would implement someone else's idea and design. That is the most fun part, and you're handing it to someone else.

Quite a strange question for someone who has assembled a really big team, including several good programmers for sure. I bet you didnt start with such a big team
The answer is simple: Because 90% of all open source projects die before releasing the first demo. So if you have not a team to start with (coders are not enough, you need graphics, sound, story etc) then you'd rather join an already succesful team and contribute something that will be used than start of a project that you will never finish.

[Dave]

you'd rather join an already succesful team and contribute something that will be used than start of a project that you will never finish.

Sure, you will join a successful team. That is the point. You won't join a team that has not had any big successes and just has a game designer who wants to tell other people what they should do.

And to get a project to the stage where people will actually want to join and contribute is very very hard. You will have to push the project a long, long way first, based on your hard effort. If you're not planning to do this through either programming or art, then I think there is little hope for your project.

David

[Jetrel]

Hmm.. OpenAnno (aka Unknown Horizons) is doing pretty well, but I wonder - it's yet another "clone game" (in this case of a game called Anno). Certainly does legitimize the effort on FIFE as not being 'just engine-ware'.

[Jastiv]

Thought I would just update this here. I did fix the website, and the lead programmer decided to return to the project under a new name (maybe because I took all his junk food away from him). Not only that but a few major bugs were just fixed. I have been working on the artwork sprites and have made quite a few. I still have to get back into using version control and upload them though.
Yes, we are still open to recruiting more people who are interested in development, including artists. The art is, of course, not up to the high quality standards of wesnoth, but offers a great opportunity for new artists to put their work into something other than a personal collection.
The lead programmer position is now filled, but there are still plenty of programming tasks.

[Jetrel]

but offers a great opportunity for new artists to put their work into something other than a personal collection.

This is surprisingly apt - this was one of my main motivations for working on wesnoth. Having an actual audience, having my art be for a purpose. Also getting lots of brutal critique so I could get better.

Critique:

1) Absolutely no copy-pasting from other games, yes that includes free-software games, because no one wants to look at the same artwork they have already seen, Wograld should have a unique look all its own (modified public domain and GPL art is ok, provided it fits into the game.) ,

You do want to have the core art of your game be unique, but it's kinda crazy to absolutely forbid borrowing utilitarian, functional bits from other games. Even wesnoth is not above this; our ships, for example, came from OpenAnno. It hurts when the core of the game is ripped off, but if it's not the core, it's not a problem.

Given the choice between not having an asset (or having a truly awful placeholder, versus having one that looks great but happens to also be in another game, players will always prefer the latter. It looks better, and there's a strong chance they haven't played the other game anyways.

3) No emotional abuse of other team members - period, this will not be tolerated. This is not a contest and artists should each work on different things to avoid walking over each others territory and turning it into a contest rather than getting the project done. I admit I started doing that with some of gnurpgs/ Serpentshard's tiles and realized that I was wasting time instead of getting the project out the door.

Agreed. It's very important to avoid 'poisonous people', and to fire them on the spot. If the practice of game development isn't fun, people are much, much less productive. Even those with scary amounts of willpower (e.g. me) are still affected.

4) there is a limit to how much "better" a piece can really get. Often, all that needs to be done is a re coloration to make it more appealing, using intermediate colors rather than photo-realism gray and brown. I will put an end to the stupidness of "better and better art" found in some other games. When it is done, it is done, there is no "making it better."

If you're arguing that it's bad to have good graphics - that it's bad to do improvements like what are seen between Diablo I -> II -> III, then you're just stupid and crazy. It's so insane and wrong that I can't really refute it, because you probably won't listen. It's like trying to explain to a conspiracy theorist that yes, we really did land on the moon.

It's also a misconception that having 'more content' is good when the content is badly done. Most players would prefer to have less monsters in a game, but have those less monsters be fully fleshed out and interesting, both in terms of gameplay mechanics, and in terms of graphical quality. There's no point in even having new environments or monsters if the content is too thin to be enjoyable. Don't bite off more content than you can decently provide, or the game will get thin and boring.

[thespaceinvader]

That last point is a really important one. I'd far prefer to see a game like wesnoth with only a few factions but with those factions well written, fleshed out and fully developed, with full histories and stories, inhabiting a well developed realistic world, than a lot of factions which have surface coolness, but little substance. This is one area where wesnoth unfortunately falls down a little - mainly because good writers are very hard to find, and fitting good writing into the sort of minimal dialogue we have is even harder.

[Ken_Oh]

"Designing the game" is not real work

Reading through this, I think that's all that needs to be said.

I'm not a real programmer, but I'm churning out as much code as I can for a Wesnoth add-on. Let me tell you what, I have about 100 times more ideas than I have time to code them. God, that makes me depressed, because I have a job where I can spend 90% of my work day coding WML if I want to.