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It seems that most of your time and effort will be going into graphics and real-time crap. Have you considered writing a roguelike? For an example, see ADOM. Roguelikes don't have fancy graphics, all calculations and algorithms are very cool and the focus can be a lot more on design than graphics.

Four words - Ancient Domains of Mystery.

ADOM is a roguelike game, and while it didn't start this genre, it is certainly the best. This deserves to be on the top 10. Easily one of the most addictive rpg's available. The amount of customization for your character is tremendous. Learning everything that there is to do, and learning what everything does burns many many hours. Don't look at the spoilers... ;)

-Nitar

This thread reminded me of an interesting anecdote.

Once, I installed ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery, a Roguelike) on a Linux (RH 6.2), Win98SE, DOS 6.22, and a Win3.11 machine (triple boot). The machine was an old 486 80mhz with 32 megs of memory.

As a normal user (not root) ADOM crashed so bad that it destroyed linux's ext2 partition, forcing a wipe and reinstall of linux. Of course it didn't do it right away, but after a random period of time after the game started.

Under win98 it also had the habit of crashing after awhile, but didn't destroy the file system.

Under DOS, it would crash, but the file system was okay upon reboot.

With win3.11 running on top of the DOS installation, it ran perfectly, without a problem.

Now the same binary was used for win3.11/DOS/win98SE. Win3.11 was installed in the same partition as DOS 6.22. Linux (of course) had its own binary.

To add to the confusion, it runs stable on two other win98SE computers (both K6-2's).

Anyways, it gave me an interesting perspective on "stability" of certain OSes.

Íåy, man, say ADoM!

I don't think that turn-based games are dead. They might be for multi-player, but that's because you have to wait for someone else. Roguelikes are single-player turn-based games, usually set in a fantasy world. Examples include nethack and ADOM. These are terribly addictive games, and I'd recommend everyone give one a try sometime.

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How could you forget the 100s of other emulators for game systems like the Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Atari, MSX, and on and on... There are great open source emulators for linux that work great on fast computers. So, actually, with classic game emulation alone, Linux has over 10,000 games easy. For a good arcade and console game system emulation site, check Zophar's Domain and look under the "Emulators for Unix" sections on the right hand side menu.

I admit that added full DOS/Windows emulation would add another 10,000 or so games, but do you even have the time to play that many games?
Oh, and nethack is cool and all, especially with that graphical front-end (has a Final Fantasy 1 look). Qt Graphical Nethack is a way to easily get your friends to start playing. Now, the best Rouge-like game has to be ADOM. It has everything that NetHack doesn't: a real storyline, towns with NPCs, agriculture, etc...

If your character dies it is *D*E*A*D*. No saves, no respawn at the start.

"died? well, that's ok, just reappear in town. want your nifty stuff back? quit to the menu and restart..."
"hey that hurt! i'll just nip back to town and get healed by the blacksmith. you wait here, ok?"
"need more experience? just quit to the menu and restart to regenerate all of those easy monsters!"

You give the impression that nethack is not under active developement, version 3.3.1 came out rather recently. It can be found at http://www.nethack.org. Other roguelikes worth mentioning are ADOM (don't worry, he's better at designing a game then a website), and Angband. There are several derivatives of Angband and Nethack, while ADOM is closed source. A good list of other roguelike games (with links) is available at http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/links.html. All of the popular roguelikes and most of the rest have linux binaries, and the source code is often available too! Nethack is even released under the GPL license.

The other side of text-based gaming are text-based MUDs, a nice list of them can be found at The Mud Connector.

The article also fails to mention that there is a free version of civilization that will run on Linux and has multi-player capability. Check out www.freeciv.org for information and downloads.

It took Blizzard long enough to push Diablo 2 out.

As for Diablo I was never much of a fan, even when it first came out it was too boring and tedious to play. Here's something with REAL replay value: ADOM.

Instead of supporting Blizzard and their franchise, you could check out some great opensource projects that Blizzard basically repackaged, made real-time, added fancier graphics, and sold to Joe Consumer.

Rogue is the grandaddy of everything. Including Diablo. See where it all began.

Angband is my favorite Rogue-like. It has incredible depth, hundreds of monsters, and hundreds of magical items. #angband on Othernet usually has at least one developer in it.

There are also a number of Angband variants such as Zangband and Pernband. Zangband even includes a multitude of quests, for those who like a little story-line to their dungeon crawls. These can all be found at the Angband link above. Graphical Tcl versions of Angband also exist, for the graphics-needy.

Others include Nethack (a light-hearted, often humorous Rogue-like), ADOM , and Moria

So, instead of marching to your local EB, why not download one of these (I heartily recommend Angband) free games and save the 40$ that Diablo 2 would cost you? You could even contribute to the project, play with the source, or add your own monsters, items, and spells. Have fun!

In my role as the creator and maintainer of the roguelike game ADOM I'd like to comment this (especially since this posting spawned an ugly thread on rec.games.roguelike.adom):

First of all I'm not taking advantage on the open source community at all. The sources of ADOM have been written from scratch and do not use any parts from other open source roguelike games (like Nethack or Angband). Anybody stating the contrary is lying in a blatant and annoying fashion.

It is also not true, that ADOM *originally* released with the caveat of releasing the sources for ADOM 1.0.0. When ADOM first got released, open source (or not) never was an important topic and initially I released ADOM to see if there was any interest in the game. Whether sources would be released or not became a topic after a year or two.

Now for that part of the story: when the topic of source code releases came up, I initially stated that I probably would do that after version 1.0.0, in order to have a cleaned up source code version of the game. I did not want to get involved in coordinating a multi-programmer project, because ADOM is a spare time leisure and the sources changed often and to a vast extent. The topic was finished with that as far as I was concerned.

Again a few years later (about a year or two ago) there was a sudden influx of folks sporting the following attitude: "You must release the sources or you are amoral, a swine and a bastard. Then we will be allowed to do whatever we want with those sources, no matter wether you agree with us or not." I tried to discuss this with the folks involved but they were extremely unreasonably and continued to insult me (I still have their emails lying around somewhere).

Since I consider ADOM and its background to be my intellectucal property, I didn't want to see my vision tarnished. There are enough roguelike games out there to modify and alter (and with much more readable source code, e.g. Angband) so that I can't see a real need to release the ADOM sources (and especial no moral obligation if the idiots out there are determined to ignore my rights).

It's sad that the nice majority will suffer due to the rants of the brain-dead few out on the 'Net, but I'm really fed up with this topic and the attacks on my person due to my views on the ADOM sources.

Note BTW that the sources for JADE (the successor to ADOM, see http://www.adom.de for details) will be freely available as soon as there is a prototype that at least allows you to start the game and run around on a map. I'm really supportive of the open source idea, I just got burned with ADOM and can be very stubborn.

If you still feel that I'm taking advantage of the open source community I hereby ask you to email me at thomas@biskup.net because I don' t visit slashdot.org regularly.

Any spelling mistakes or other problems in this article should be attributed to my incomplete grasp of the english language (I'm a native German).

Try taking a look at Ancient Domains of Mystery at www.adom.de. The interface is very similiar to Rogue... good ol' ASCII, no sound, randomly generated levels. It has a much more detailed story line... not to mention that the game is much more complex. Multiplatform, too... all those Linux lovers out there will be happy with it, along with DOSsie's like me ;o).
Take a look... I definitely recommend it. It's "postcard-ware," btw... nice and easy on the wallet.

Have fun!

Using Gnu, or any other method or means to produce something, shouldn't make any difference as to whether someone can package it commercially. The time and creative effort to compose the package has to be worth something.

Althought I believe in what you are saying about developer time I think that this can work both in the same vein adom has both commercial features and features that are essentially free (the program has compiled versions for dos and linux x86) and allows for purtchessing of a commercial version for about $20 which allows for special features. This helps both causes: the developer, and the user.

Giving away a product on the premise that you can sell support is fine, if it can fly. But I'd rather have cash in hand.

Again this is fine. However if you want your product to fly if you are doing this freelance usually you get a wider audience if you use the GPL because concievably it could be included say in the next version of Debian or Red Hat.

Ancient Domains of Mystery is defintly the best roguelike ever. The plot, gimmicks and programming are so imaginative. A dungeon with a frictionless surface? Fluff balls, when watered, mutate into gremlins?! Amazing. And, of course, it runs on linux.

Nethack is loads of fun. However, the best has got to be ADOM. It has many of the familiar "Rogue-like" game qualities, but feels more like a pencil-and-paper RPG than any of the others (IMHO)- there are multiple dungeons, quests, etc. I have lost far more hours than I care to admit trying to beat that game...

ADOM IS MY LIFE ADOM ADOM ADOM thomas biskup is a god. ADOM

try Adom, a free rogue-like game that kicks major ass. It has a real steep curve (which I have yet to surmount... tho I haven't really tried) but once you do it has a whole world to explore. You'll freak at the sight of a few measly ASCII characters!