LGP Announces Game Development Team

Ronald Hymer writes "Linuxlookup.com is reporting Linux Game Publishing has announced the Linux Game Development Project team. The eight winners of LGP's game development company initiative were announced last evening and Linuxlookup's very own resident programmer Matt Wilson was granted one of the eight positions on the team. Along with project information, they link submitted code samples along with the team member URL's." See our previous story about this. Hey team: no penguins in your game, okay?

Comments

Good Luck

[FortKnox]

Good luck competing in todays PC gaming market (hope you have the cash to buy a good game engine instead of taking the time to make one from scratch).
Remember, graphics and wizbangs are what makes the sale, but plot and fun is what makes a game outlast time.

Re:Good Luck

[garcia]

but plot and fun is what makes a game outlast time.

Wow, I still have my 21 year old Ms. Pacman machine. There's no plot. There's no graphics. Yet it somehow stands the test of time (also the fact that they recently re-released it in conjunction w/another arcade classic).

Re:Good Luck

[Osty]

And who knows, maybe they'll even develop some kind of new game genre that is better than recycling the game engines everyone else licenses or clones (ahem, FPS, can we come up with a new genre?).

A game engine is just that -- an engine. Quake, Unreal, etc don't have to be used in FPS games (witness Anachronox, Splinter Cell). I think it's unfair to think of these engines as FPS engines, because they're not -- they are 3D world engines, and can be used by developers to do whatever they can imagine (within the limits of modern hardware and any artificially imposed limits of the engine, though many of those can be removed).

As for coming up with new genres, do you have any ideas? In the past 10-ish years, we've seen only a few genres arise -- FPS, RTS, MMOG (that's more a meta-genre, with categories like MMORPG, MMOSS, MMOFPS, etc). Two or three genres in a decade is pretty damned good.

Penguin turds

[shlong]

Hey team: no penguins in your game, okay?
Amen brother!

Hopefully not Linux versions of...

[L0stb0Y]

...all those microsoft.com games that EVERY PERSON IN MY OFFICE SEEMS TO PLAY...

Bespelled, Bejeweled....hell, I was starting to think BeOS was making a comeback in the online games industry...

Actually, it would be great to see some Linux games that could still be enjoyable on slightly older machines...

But I second the opinion, please, no Giant Robotic penguins battling for supreme server space....

A nice Mech game would be good...

LosT

Re:Cool...

[Randolpho]

Yes! I second this wholeheartedly!!!!1!11!!!!!!

I miss old-skool graphic adventures. Sure, go 3D if ya gotta, but stick to the gameplay similar to, say, the old Sierra *Quest series.

And remember... Story, Graphics, Story, Gameplay, Story!

I'm on windows because

[mwolff]

Yeah, the only flaw I can find with Linux is the lack of games.

No penguins.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wan't a game with chicks, guns and blood.. NOT merchandise for the OS it runs best on...

RPG's?

[Anonymous Coward]

They seem to make or break the systems in the console market. The final fantasy series is totally evidence of that. Good adventure games would be sweet too. Anyone for Sam n Max?

Hey I've an idea

[zannox]

Without sounding sarcastic, what to they expect to accomplish? Loki tried; they had excellent game engines and talented programmers. Tribes 2, Hero's of Might & Magic 3, Heavy Gear 2, Heretic 2, Railroad Tycoon, Myth 1 & 2. Not to mention the Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 and the ton of Quake 2/3 based games. **IF** Loki's biggest problem was indeed mismanagement then lets hope LGP has better people in charge.

I think they should start with Tribes 3 :) Hey LGP!!! Give Sierra a call. I'm sure they will hook you up like they did Loki. "You can co-develop along with windows, can't release it till 6 months after the windows client is released. PLUS we will charge you 100's of 1000's of bucks for engine licensing. Then, we will release the engine for 100 bucks AFTER you've folded" /sarcasm

One possible project

[Kiwi]

One project these developers can do is finish up and polish xconq, which is a GPL multi-platform real-time strategy wargame which has been in a perpetual state of being incomplete for 17 years now. The game has only two part-time developers and one of them is becoming blind; this game has a lot of promise and I would love to see it get the kind of professional polish that a team of eight programmers working on it for a year can give it.

I much prefer an open-source game; it allows me to make tweaks and implement house rules; something a proprietary game does not allow.

- Sam

yeah right...

[juggleboy]

So, the typical game developer would have about 8 coders working fulltime, and a typical game development cycle is about 18 months...
Here we have 8 coders, working parttime. A quick conversion into man-hours, and it'll take them, say, 6-10 years to make a game?

And they haven't even got a game idea! And there's a vague mention of hiring some artists at some point, which is more than a little weird considering the artists have at least as much work to do as the coders...

Any designers writing design documents? Nope, didn't think so.

If the genre's an acronym, that's not new

[ianscot]

Personally, I'd like to see something combining the storyline of a good RPG with the action of a good FPS. Open ended would be nice, something like Privateer or Freelancer but in a fantasy or military setting rather than as a space sim.

Not that I'd mind any of those things, but when you can refer to the genre of your game in shorthand ("FPS") and you want to re-make existing games in a different setting, that's hardly breaking new ground. Do we want the open community to produce nothing but less-polished takes on overpriced, over-card-dependent consumer boxed titles?

(Anyone who can come up with a worthy successor to M.U.L.E. would have my blessing, such as it is.)