A remake of the classic Wizardry video games
Copyright Eric Pietrocupo
Wizardry Legacy
WL Adventures
Filed in: News.News202104100258AM · Modified on : April 10, 2021, at 03:01 AM - Visits 777
There has been a lot of thinking lately, and if you are reading this I would like to have your comments. You can e-mail me, else I am thinking in doing a survey, it would appear on the main page when ready. Still your emails can help me build the questionnary.
I think it could be a good thing to finish what I started, and I think there could be still a demand for such game. But it would still require a few years to bring the project to term which makes me wonder if it's worth putting all that time into it. This is when the idea of commercialising the product came to my mind.
Since the game could be rethemed and because many new mechanics has been introduced in the game (and new ideas are to come) the game could be different enough to be published on its own. Now there are many interrogations on how excatly it could be done, will I use open source assets in a commercial game. Can I use a publisher to fill in the missing assets. There is also a cmomplex is around the source code.
Since I am the only author of the source code, I can change at any time the license on the code. So if I go commercial, I would need to close the source or change it's license. Now I asked myself what is the goal behind open source. Well there is generally 2 purpose: A) allow contribution from others B) allow other to use my work. First, I don't like when people play with my code, so I am not sure if I really want contribution in my code. Second, others could benefit from some portion of my code, but its applications are relatively limited.
So the strategy I intend to use is "divide and conquer" by splitting the project into various sub-projects. That could make the development of the game look less overwhelming and some portion of the project would remain open source. The first goal is to extract the portions that could be used in other projects including non-gaming software. I found 2 parts so far worth extracting:
Once those modules are extracted, that means that they could be reused easily in different project. That would also simplify development as both modules will have it's own git repository and will be compiled as external libraries. So when I compile a game, I don't need to compile the content of those libraries. Which could save some compilation time in the end. There are a few projects idea that I have in mind, one thing I could do is create 3 different game with the modules above:
Now there is a portion of the code between the commercial and the open version that could be shared. If I can extract it as a reusable side module, I'll do it, else it might just end up as common code shared by both projects. Not sure how I will handle that portion of the code. Will I put it open under Apache license so that people could assemble the whole game, or will it be closed source. One thing for sure, there will be little reusability elsewhere than in the games listed above.
So this is what I am working with right now. Stay tuned for an upcomming survey about the commercial project. If you want to "backup" the source code in case some portion gets closed, go ahead, be my guess. A lot of code will change, some will be sompletely replaced.
Powered by PmWiki and the Green skin