New 3D Game Project: AresEd, looking for developers and artists

[jorrit]

Hi all,

I'm the author of Crystal Space and CEL and I'm in the process of starting a new game (+editor) project. The project is called Ares (and the editor AresEd).

The first focus of this project is to make an editor. You can compare this editor to editors as used by other games like Fallout3 and Oblivion. In this video blog entry you can see a demonstration on how it currently works. Note that this editor is not finished but it is already doing some nice things: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3wlNbHheY4

The second part of this project is to work on the game logic. Most work for this has already been done. The remaining task is to put things together and work on some of the missing features. You can see a demonstration on the CEL entity system (which is going to be used by this project) here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H6UnKwuzAM

The third part of this project is to make an actual game. There are some ideas about this but everything is open. Also the idea is that this editor+game logic will be very general and generic so that you can make a lot of different games with it. The ability to mod games will also be very important.

And of course, all this is Open Source and Free Software. I'm looking for a number of people to help me with this. First I need developers. Having C++ experience is recommended as Crystal Space and CEL are written in C++. You should be willing to learn and step in a big project. Of course we will not let you sit in the cold with that. There is an active IRC channel (#CrystalSpace at FreeNode) where there are always CS developers on and you can get a lot of help there. This page lists a few of the things that have to be done but there is much more.

Of course I will also need artists. For 3D and animation artists I prefer people that can work with Blender as we have very good support for converting blender models to Crystal Space. But also 2D and sound artists are needed.

One of the most important features that I need is motivated people! I think that this is a really exciting new project and I hope that the people that will help me with this are equally motivated.

Visit http://code.google.com/p/ares/ for more information. If you are interested in helping then contact me at jorrit dot tyberghein at gmail dot com

Thanks!

[potare]

Neat idea. How do you join it?

[jorrit]

Neat idea. How do you join it?

You just did :-)

Seriously though. Just send me an email (jorrit dot tyberghein at gmail dot com) and tell me what you have to offer.

Greetings,

[potare]

ok

[jorrit]

Hi all,

In the past few days I worked hard to get the Ares wiki up to speed. The main entry point is here:

http://code.google.com/p/ares/wiki/MainPage

A few interesting places to visit (beware of game spoilers!):

• High level todo: http://code.google.com/p/ares/wiki/Todo
• Summary of the game story: http://code.google.com/p/ares/wiki/AresGame

But there are many more pages. All work in progress of course.

I'm still looking for motivated people to help me with this project. On the technology side we are already pretty far. We have a good working game entity system and AresEd (the editor) is starting to work nicely too (although more work is needed there). I still need the following people:

• More programmers. Most of the programming will be in CEL and Ares. I consider CS to be mostly ready for our purposes. Experience with C++ is a must. The ability to learn and a *lot* of motivation are essential.
• Concept artist
• 3D Artist(s) for static models. This requires working in Blender. The person(s) doing this will have to make models for various kinds of objects in the game: weapons, tools, building blocks for making houses in AresEd, spaceships, human technology, ...
• 3D Artist(s) for animated meshes. I would like to have a flexible system in Ares where the game designer can easily create and kind of NPC body and face. Also for the player it should be possible to do this. My ideal system is that we have three base models: a female human, a male human, an alien. And then using face/body customization we can create hundreds of NPCs from that. We mostly have the technology for this ready. We just need an artist to cooperate with us on achieving this goal.
• Sound artist. Sound effects and music mostly.

Contact me if you are interested in joining this ambitious game project!

[Catlemur]

I could help with developing the lore,brainstorming on weapons and other "trivial" things.But no coding.
Catlemur
P.S. Are you still working on Peragro?

[jorrit]

I could help with developing the lore,brainstorming on weapons and other "trivial" things.But no coding.
Catlemur
P.S. Are you still working on Peragro?

Ok, perhaps you can read a bit on the current story and what we have so far. Should give you an idea. I will try to setup a forum or mailing list somewhere so that we can focus the discussion there.

I was never a member of Peragro.

Greetings,

[jorrit]

I remade my first video blog entry on Ares with better video capture software:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O94HVzPm6HY

Have fun watching!