User:Grumbel
From Homestar Runner Wiki
In the first of a new wave of Free Gamer content, Ingo Ruhnke aka Grumbel and one of the most prolific open source game developers around has kindly taken the time to do an interview.
Please note that Ingo's first language is not English, and I've not modified his answers in any way other than to sanitize links. I have made a few notes on his answers at the end of the interview. Many thanks to Ingo for taking time to answer my questions, especially in so much detail - much more than I could have hoped for! :-)
Just in case you left your brain at home today, the questions are bold and prefaced with a Q - and the answers, er, not bold with no Q.
Q. In my best Cilla Black accent, "What's yer name an' where d'ya come from?"
My Name is Ingo Ruhnke in the real world, on IRC and web forums I use to call myself Grumbel. I am coming from good old Germany from a town called Bielefeld:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy Q. And what do you do for a living?
I am going to end my studies soon, not yet sure what I will do after that, I thought a bit about turning into the independent game business, but not sure if I will actually do it in the end. Q. What is your favourite open source game(s)?
Adonthell, since it happens to be one of the very few open source games that actually has story, characters and dialog, it also happens to have the best music of any open source games rivaling even that of many commercial titles. The gameplay of the game is very basic, but story, characters and stuff are just so good that its simply not an issue. Its not the longest game around, but the most interesting one. Q. What is your favourite commercial game(s)?
That would be Another World and The Longest Journey.
Another World because it was and still is absolutely revolutionary in so many aspects. Its a very short game, but one that basically never repeats, every moment in it is uniq, the story, even so told without a word is absolutely stunning and the polygon based 2D graphic was something very different then everything else at its time. Its a game that simply lacks what makes video games look like video games and instead turns them into an interactive experience. And as if that wouldn't be already enough, its also a game that got created from start to finish by only a single person.
The Longest Journey on the other side is much more a classical adventure game, but one of the best. It improved on what LucasArts did in terms of interface and added an epic sci-fi/fantasy story into the mix like there is no other. I like games that feature interesting characters and worlds and The Longest Journey simply has tons of both. Q. What games do you play at the moment, FLOSS or commercial?
At the moment not much, I don't yet own any of the next generation consoles (still waiting for a price cut on the XBox360) and there simply aren't much more games coming out for the current generation. So I am kind of stuck there. My PC also happens to be not in the shape any more for commercial PC games and that Vista Beta I am running beside my Linux isn't exactly in the best shape either. However I recently replayed AstroBoy Omega factor on the GBA, since thats my favorite game for that machine and I also plan to have a deeper look into my linux version of X2 soon.
In terms of FLOSS I don't really play much of those at all, I enjoyed Adonthell a lot, had some fun with Neverball, but beside that I am not interesting in most of the games Q. What open source games have you worked on, preferrably in chronological order?
Lets see if I can get that figured out without forgetting anything:
In the very beginning I did some C64 Basic and QBasic applications, most playable was a simple clone of that motorcycle game of the Tron movie, another thing was a labyrinth/dungeon game, but that never went anywhere and didn't got finished. All that stuff is available on the net, but not very interesting for most people I guess:
pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...qbasic.html
After those I moved on to C++ and coded Retriever, it was meant to be an adventure game and written under DOS with DJGPP and Allegro, it never went beyond a little demo in which you could walk through a few screen, but I am currently recycling a few of the concepts for Windstille.
pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-retriever.png
Closely after Retriever came Vect, a simple vector graphics editor, that might be used to create the graphics for Retriever. Its kind of usable, but not exactly very confortable, it again was coded primary for DOS with DJGPP and Allegro.
pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-vect2.png pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-vect.png
Then I moved onto Linux and switched from Allegro to ClanLib, my first game then happens to be Pingus, a rather straight forward Lemmings clone with penguins, its quite playable, but to this day not exactly finished.
Sometimes after that I did a tiny little bit work on TuxRacer, nothing big, just a script for Gimp to make level creation a bit easier, a few levels and a few bug reports.
The next game that I wrote from scratch was Feuerkraft, it was somewhat inspired by the old Amiga game Firepower, but not a direct clone, it has plenty of influence from games such as GTA and Operation Flashpoint, as with most of my stuff, I never really finished it.
http://www.nongnu.org/feuerkraft/ Feuerkraft on video.google.com
Sometimes in between I did start Advent, which was basically a rewrite from Retriever. I was trying to give it a proper scripting interface and make it properly extensible, which Retriever really wasn't. One of the results was Cosmos, a little demo game build on top of the engine, due to library and binary incompatibilities it however might no longer be playable today:
http://www.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/advent.new/
Then came Freecraft aka Stratagus, a real time strategy engine along the lines of Warcraft2. Its again a project where I didn't really contribute much and only joined in rather late. For most part I simply organize the rename from Freecraft to Stratagus that was needed after the cease and desist letter from Blizzard, I picked up the bits and pieces, did a new webpage and some stuff like that. I didn't ever touch the engine itself.
In the follow up of the Stratagus rename came Robovasion, it was meant as a little demo game to show that Stratagus can be used for other games beside Warcraft2. While the basic design got quite finished, it never got properly implemented due to some missing core features in Stratagus. Since in the meantime there followed other games that made use of Stratagus as an engine there soon was no longer a need for Robovasion, so it never got finished.
http://www.nongnu.org/robovasion/
Construo is again a project I started myself and did most of the coding. Its a simple particle+spring engine/editor, the game doesn't have any goals, its more like LEGO bricks where you can just toy around with and build your own stuff. Its one of the few games I did that ever become fully playable, its not 100% feature complete, but what it does, it does quite well:
http://www.nongnu.org/construo/
Sometime after that came Windstille, it started as a little recreation of Turrican style gameplay, but soon moved on to became something very different. A little demo with Turrican style gameplay was however released:
Windstille on video.google.com
netPanzer was kind of interesting, one day I got a email of one of the original creators who asked me if I had some use for the code in Feuerkraft, since Feuerkraft was a 2D action game, not a stratagey one I declined. Since the netPanzer project didn't went anyway after a year I contacted them again if they still want to do anything with the code, they agreed that it would be ok to OpenSource it and so I build a little webpage and announced it on happypenguin.org. Soon after the announcement was done some people picked it up and ported it to Linux, I again didn't really touch much of the code, but simply did a bit organisation here and there.
A while after that Happypenguin GoTM was born, it was a project meant to pick every month a open source game and improve some key aspects of it. We started with SuperTux and joined an already ongoing effort to bring the old SuperTux into a clean shape. I did most of the graphics, some code and around half of the levels of the reborn SuperTux Milestone1.
http://www.happypenguin.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1243 http://supertux.lethargik.org
After SuperTux was done, some people moved on to TuxKart, we didn't manage to turn it into a playable game and had to fork it due to some issues, but plenty of new graphics got done and some unfinished improvements where done. A while after the SuperTuxKart code was picked up by some other people and the project is quite alive know gain:
http://supertuxkart.berlios.de/
Then GotM picked LinCity and we gave that game some new graphics and user interface, I modeled most of the 3D buildings, while other people worked on the code and interface graphics. The project got mostly finished, however I still consider it a failure since one of the key problems wasn't addressed, namely the game still misses a proper tutorial and some game elements just don't make any sense.
Windstille also got picked up by GotM, while we didn't manage a release, it got a large over vault and its the game that I am currently still working on. Beside from that I am also a little bit working on getting SuperTux Milestone2 done. Q. Of the above, do you have a favourite?
Construo is probably my best game that nobody knows about, its plain and simple and actually fun to play, while many of the other projects never went that far and got stuck somewhere earlier. It happens to be the only of my games that I can actually enjoy playing. Beside from that there is also Windstille, since that game is in some part based on Retriever and I am kind of working on it for like 10 years I have grown pretty attached to it. Q. What attracted you to developing & contributing to open source games rather than selling your efforts as shareware or commercial titles?
Rather simple: Money means trouble, no money means a smooth ride. If I open source it I don't have to care about advertising, publishers and whatever, I can simply concentrate on the game and do whatever I like instead of trying to figure out what would actually sell. Open Source also gives the freedom to recycle bits and pieces from other project much easier. Its also much easier to accept contributions when no money is involved.
That said, all this is of course only true as long as you don't need the money and do it in your spare time, when you actually want to make a living out of writing games Open Source doesn't seem to be much of a good choice. Q. From your experiences, what would you say are the best tips for making a successful open source game?
I think the by far two most important things are this:
Figure out what exactly you want to do before announcing the game to the public. Sounds simple, but many Open Source games completly fail on that, people tweak around an engine for month and years without anybody having a clue where the whole game is actually going. So they never really go anywhere with their project, but just running around in circles forever.
Don't expect anybody else to help you, be prepared to do everything yourself. When you do a Open Source game you won't magically get contributions, you might get none at all, so you shouldn't depend on them to get the job done, but instead be prepared to do everything yourself. Q. What are the things to avoid, the things that make FLOSS game development fail?
One simple rule would be to not start a new project, ever. Try to join one of the already ongoing Open Source projects, if you don't see them going anywhere, hijack them and give them some direction. A goalless project can often be very easily turned into a different direction, it just requires that you actually know exactly where you want to be going.
Another thing: Don't aim to low. Of course you shouldn't try to do Doom3 when you don't have a clue about 3D programming, but there simply isn't a need for yet another Tetris clone, we have by far enough of that. If you try something new, try to actually make something new, don't just recreate something for which there already exist dozens of recreations. Q. If you could take one abandoned FLOSS game and restore it's development (excluding your own titles!) which would it be?
Liquidwar, that game has a pretty cool concept, but rather ugly interface and graphics, it could definitely need some additional polish and improvements.
My favorite Adonthell also needs a new release, it has been going forward very slowly in the last years and could definitely need a solid push. Q. What are your future game development plans and which of your games do you hope to see come to fruition in the near future?
I currently do a lot of work on Windstille, a lot of which actually isn't even very relevant to the game itself (i.e. history, ship design, etc.). I am more or less trying to create a little universe instead of just what I would need for a simple 2D action adventure. If I ever get done with Windstille itself, I probably turn some of that additional material into a game of its own. One thing I always wanted to do was a realistic mech simulation, kind of an Operation Flashpoint in space type of game. However knowing that such a game would require a loooonnnggg time I prefer to stick for the moment with my simple 2D game in the Windstille universe, since even that is already hard enough of a thing to get done.
Interview Notes
- Adonthell:
http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/
- Liquid War 5:
http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5
- Development of Liquid War is ongoing - the game has been rewritten from scratch and become part of the GNU project as Liquid War 6:
http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/
