Spider Stomper
Posts: 213
Joined: Friday, 13th April 2012, 08:33
DCSS: Successful Open-Source Game Development
EDIT: It's up!! If you have an account at Gamasutra, please comment! Hopefully I can get featured.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RosstinM ... uelike.php
I'm posting here to get some opinions from the dev team about what the successes and hardships of the open-source model have been for Crawl. I'm also curious if anyone who posts here was a member of the team which approached Linley in the 2000s. Galehar seems to be the most active dev poster. I'm curious why Crawl was chosen for further development in particular. What experiences have you had working with a codebase that you didn't originally write?
I think one of the most interesting things about Crawl's development is the philosophies behind it. There's even a philosophy page in the game's help menu. As far as I can see, the core dev philosophies are:
# Don't waste the player's time.
# Optimal play should also be fun.
# Every decision you make should be meaningful.
# A variety of strategies can be used to succeed.
# Elegance in number of features and options
I'd like to hear some dev opinions on whether these are accurate, what you disagree on, etc.
Essentially, if the devs want to vent or reminisce, I'd love to hear it!
Me: I'm a game developer and avid Crawl player. I've ascended a number of times although I've never gone for the 15...
I made this for the article so far: