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[Unpaid] Isometric old school 2d RPGs searching for additional 3d artists
mvbarracuda \| 10/17/2009 @088 \| edit post

Team name:
PARPG development team.

Project name:
PARPG - post-apocalyptic roleplaying game. It's just a working title at the moment and we can reconsider it later.

Brief description:
I had plans for such a project for quite some time but it was more of a vague idea than anything else. In late January 2009 I decided to start writing down my ideas for the project at a wiki. PARPG will be an old school 2d isometric roleplaying game, inspired by genre classics such as Fallout, Arcanum or Planescape: Torment.

The development team has agreed upon the following key elements:
* Singleplayer RPG. No plans for multiplayer or coop support.
* Post-apocalyptic setting. Story, setting and game mechanics details get fleshed at the moment.
* Written in Python (2.5x branch). Utilizing the FIFE game engine.
* Isometric 2d perspective instead of going for full 3d engine complexity.
* Open source code and asset licensing.
* Open development philosophy. Public development wiki and forums. Anonymous SVN checkout.
* Meaningful choices and consequences. Multiple paths to complete quests, including non-violent ways.
* Tactical, turnbased combat.
* Emphasis on well-written detailed branching tree dialogue.

More information about agreed upon setting aspects and game mechanics can be found here:
* Game mechanics draft.
* Setting draft.

Target aim:
Open source & non profit. Actual code and content licensing (which open source license to choose) will be discussed among the team.

Compensation:
Although there are no intentions to make monetary profit with the project, there are a bunch of potential reasons for developers to get involved:
* Improving your personal portfolio with the demo version of the game to land a job in the industry. The demo will be a one town / location version of the game. Creating such a demo will be an already quite challenging task and it gives us the chance to test concepts in a smaller scale undertaking first before trying to tackle a full game. A more detailed description of the demo concept can be found at the project wiki.
* Love for old school isometric 2d RPGs.
* Enthusiasm for open source game development.
* Gaining game development experience by working on a team project.

Technology:
Targeted platforms: Linux, Win32. Mac support would be a plus but judging from the project that I worked on in the past, finding a Mac maintainer can be a lot of hassle so supporting Macintosh systems is not a must.

Programming language: Python 2.5x; not all important Python libraries have been ported to Py3k yet so we'll stick to the 2.5 branch for now.

Engine: FIFE. I was personally involved in the FIFE project for three years and although the engine is not feature-complete and development is currently going slow, it might be the best basis that is available for such a project.

Talent needed:
Graphics artist
We're trying to find artists who would like to contribute in one of the following possible fields of work:
* 3d modeling: creating either organic or inorganic 3d models e.g. (non) player characters, items, weapons, etc. Blender would be the prefered tool of choice. A first rendering setup has been created and can be found in our SVN repository now: http://parpg-svn.cvsdude.com/parpg/trunk/media/blender/rendering_setup_01.blend

Team structure:
amo-ej1 - python programmer
barra - public relations, developer recruitment, infrastructure maintenance, project management
kaydeth - python programmer
or1andov - python programmer
sirren - 3d artist (character modeling & animation)
zenbitz - Python programmer; besides his plans to contribute as game programmer, he currently fleshes out the mechanics of PARPG. zenbitz comes from a pen & paper RPG background

Website:
Blog
Forum
IRC logs
Subversion repository
Trac - task tracker
Wiki

Contact:
I prefer contact via email: martin DOT vohland AT googlemail DOT com
In case you can't get in contact with me via mail for whatever reason there may be, you can PM me here as well. However personal message notification via email does not seem to work so it could take a day or two until I spot your PM.

Additional information:
Screenshots:

Animations:

Concept Art:

Render:

Feedback:
Any kind of feedback is appreciated. We're more than willing to learn from any mistake so shoot, we can take it

Re: [Unpaid] Isometric old school 2d RPGs searchin
mvbarracuda \| 11/04/2009 @842 \| edit post

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update. This time the question of the week is: Mirror mirror on the wall, who has the fairest portrait of them all? You decide!

To cope with the complexity of creating an entire large-scale game, we've recently agreed to start using Trac and especially its ticket feature for all departments as it turned out to be a great help for our programmers.

The programming department established a weekly round table meeting. Feel free to be around, they meet every Saturday, 6PM GMT at the project's IRC channel.

Map changing has been finally fixed so you can now return to map as well without crashing PARPG anymore. Furthermore the work on the quest_engine has been started and finally load and save functionality are working again as well.

The introduction articles of the writing and graphics departments have been recently revamped and placeholder dialog has been replaced with actual character lines for the techdemo. Say hello to the drunkard!

The settings of the Blender rendering setup have been documented at the wiki, hoping that 3d artists who use different 3d modeling packages might be able to use this kind of information to set up their tool of choice for PARPG.

Our wiki gallery finally features a (yet _very_ small) screenshot section and you can now decide which portrait you like best.

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

That's all for today. Next news update scheduled for Monday, 16nd of November. See you then

And here's my personal favourite: Gaspard's hatman portrait:

Re: [Unpaid] Isometric old school 2d RPGs searchin
mvbarracuda \| 11/17/2009 @707 \| edit post

Note: I've adjusted the contact information in the starting post. Please DO NOT get in contact with me via email or PM if you would like to get involved in PARPG.

Personally answering every application turned out to be a lot of stress and as I'm rather busy right now, we have to send you to the introduction board of our forums, where you can get involved in the project. I know it sucks that you have to register there but it turned out to be the only viable solution for us at this point. Application emails have been piling up during busy weeks and I simply didn't have the time to check out all of them and reply to them in a way that each serious application would have deserved to be replied to. Thanks for your understanding.

But let's get to the news update right now! Sometimes there seem to be an endless number of obstacles to jump over in the course of developing a large scale game from scratch. In the end it all comes down to persistence to work through all of this. This said: heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update!

Let's start with a short FIFE-related note: if you're running the SVN version of PARPG on your Windows system, make sure you check out the new FIFE Win32 DevKit. The FIFE team recently updated their DevKit to address a really annoying guichan issue and furthermore also moved from Python 2.5 to Python 2.6. Our download guide has been updated according to it so make sure to check it out!

On the code front amo-ej1 created a dialog validation tool that will help the writers to verify that the dialog files don't contain any syntactical errors. Furthermore: saritor started to refactor our GUI code in a branch, an architecture proposal can be found at the wiki.

Here's a quick rundown of the events in the graphics department. New artist on the team comscar created the portrait of a snow shoveler in cooperation with veteran Gaspard. As Gaspard has been on a drawing spree lately, he also had a stab at this snow panorama.

Continuum modeled a collection of rusty barrels while new artist on the team EGO created two mockups of the techdemo mall area. While EGO was on a run he also created a lone explorer concept.

Looks like the situation in the concept art department is improving lately: Q_x is new on the team as well and contributed a main menu concept right away. We have also updated the wiki gallery over the course of the last two weeks and added additionals screenshots there.

I know that I sound like a broken record but we're still short of 3d artists

You would like to help us out of our misery? Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself at our forums!

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

That's all for today. Next news update scheduled for Monday, 30th of November. See you then

As we're still short of 3d artists at the moment, concept art veteran zeli had a stab at 3d modeling again. Not bad for the start:

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