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Battle For Wesnoth Seeks New Developers
jones_supa writes: Twelve years ago, David White sat down over a weekend and created the small pet project that we know today as the open source strategy game The Battle For Wesnoth. At the time, Dave was the sole programmer, working alongside Francisco Muñoz, who produced the first graphics. As more and more people contributed, the game grew from a tiny personal project into an extensive one, encompassing hundreds of contributors. Today however, the ship is sinking. The project is asking for help to keep things rolling. Especially requested are C++, Python, and gameplay (WML) programmers. Any willing volunteers should have good communication skills and preferably be experienced with working alongside fellow members of a large project. More details can be found at the project website.
I think it's time for Wesnoth to declare itself in deep freeze. Stop tinkering with the project. Do what professional game developers do: Freeze the format of game definition files. Don't change them, breaking third party addons, every time you release a new version of Wesnoth. In the linked article, this developer whines about "unmaintained mainline campaigns". If the WML (Wesnoth's own language used to describe game rules and campaigns) did not change with every Wesnoth release, breaking third-party content, content developers would be able to spend time making better compelling content instead of playing the "catch up with the developers' arbitrary API changes" game.
The Wesnoth developers did this to themselves. They now have 10, count that 10 unmaintained campaigns in the main game. If Wesnoth was properly managed, those campaigns would be fully functional today. The Wesnoth development team did not have the discipline to keep the content interface stable.
I have many fond memories of wasting too much time playing Wesnoth. Thanks to all the people who brought the game this far and here's too many more years! /cheers
Complexity Happens
I miss the single player adventure games like from Sierra and Lucas Arts where you can engross yourself in a story game line, and have work to solve puzzles and you celibate when you continue the story plot, without having to use twitch like hand eye coordination, or play online with a bunch of people just trying to mess you up.
But those times have ended. It is too easy and tempting to get spoilers on line, people tolerance towards game frustration has diminished...
Now he made a popular open source game, people liked it and it grew for a time. That is great... however times change, and popular games soon become tiresome. Updates and fixes and new content doesn't really excite as much after a while.
There isn't really that much to gain in Open Source games, because of the entertainment value of the game vs practical value. A game will offer a few months of joy perhaps a couple of years, then it will get old and tiresome, and they will be a new one out. You are better off selling it make a lot of money from it, then go on to new projects once it has peaked. I am not trying to be Mr. Anti Open Source, but Open Source works better on serious infrastructure type of projects, Operating Systems, Web Servers, Databases, programming languages... These tend to have long term demand, and invested interests on maintaining the project, including full time support. If my company is dependent on the success of an Open Source project, it may be useful, to hire resources to contribute to it, it may be a better value then buying stock into a closed source company, as you are actively contributing you get a better say on what goes on in your critical infrastructure software needs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What you're asking for is developers to volunteer their time to work on what is the most difficult and least-rewarding part of game development - bug-fixing, maintenance, and compatibility issues. As a contract programmer, I get paid a lot per hour for helping out projects up against a deadline. It's difficult, frustrating work, and it takes me several times longer to find and fix a bug than a regular dev who has been working on the project for the last few years. Even so, they pay me to do this, because any bug I do find frees their internal devs to fix other issues.
In short, it's *real work*. There's a reason you generally need to pay people to do this. The previous devs have already finished the fun part of the game - designing and building the game from the ground up. What's left is now is the hard, shitty work - trying to fix all the bugs, and work around an old, crusty engine that can't seem to keep from breaking scenarios from release to release - signs that there are serious under-the-hood problems (which they sort of admit themselves).
I wish you guys all the best, and hope you find some philanthropic devs to help you. Unfortunately, any free time I find myself with goes into my own personal project. There's simply no way I can spread myself even thinner.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It's not a sign of failure to say the game is finished with development.
I remember Battle for Wesnoth when it was just beginning. I love fantasy wargames, but most other people don't. Wargamers want hardcore reality, and fantasy fans want roleplaying, so they don't often meet and when they do it usually pisses off one camp or the other. I played it, enjoyed the hell out of it (it's basically Panzer General with some bits rearranged), and was disappointed when the main campaign ended abruptly in an unfinished scenario. Oh well, it was clearly under development, I'll come back later. That's how this kind of thing works.
When I finally saw a link to it a few years later, I remembered it and excitedly tried it again. This time the main campaign worked and there were other campaigns to download. Great! But...the campaign I played was poorly written because it was easy to get into a walking dead situation, where you had no chance to win, none. I complained about it on the official forums and was told I needed to have developed at least 2 third-level healers by the scenario I couldn't finish. Are you kidding? How was I supposed to know that? Isn't this kind of bullshit that killed the adventure game?
I started hanging around the forums since I liked the game so much and was disturbed by what I saw. The game was chosen for a "Google Summer of Code" project and had all sorts of artists and other nongamers hanging around. Super, you think, right? Not really. These people weren't with Wesnoth to make a better game, they were here to as a sort of training session. They didn't give a crap about the game itself, and it showed. They were real keen on doing the 90% of fun work, and leaving the 10% of hard work unfinished. And hell, why not? It's for your class project, after you get your letter grade for class or your SoC participation verified or your bullet point on your resume, leave it for others to finish. It's open source, if you don't like it change it yourself. And IMO this is why Wesnoth is where it is today. It's not a game, it's a continual software development project first and foremost. It can never be finished. If that ever happened, there would be no more resume polishing, and that would be a great tragedy.
I'm probably going to get an angry Wesnoth fan rebutting me with something like, "you're not a member of the community! Your opinion doesn't count because you're not a part of our ecosystem." And you know, you're right. I'm not. I'm just someone who likes fantasy wargames.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'm playing it for the first time. It's fun. No need to get worked up over a bug that most probably doesn't exist any more.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Wesnoth is a pretty fun multi-player game. With a decent map design and thanks to them finally fixing the broken RNG it can be lots of fun to take the now reasonably balanced factions and fight with them.
That said I consider Wesnoth a fundamentally broken design when it comes to the single-player game, for exactly the reasons you state. It has many of the bad aspects of a rogue-like without many of the good aspects, and frankly good story design is next to impossible in it. I've tried writing a few scenarios, the WML interface started out awful, and is now much better, but the core problem with the game remains.
First randomness should never be a core element of game design. You can use it to add a bit of spice, but you should never win or lose a game because of luck. in multi-player this is less of an issue as a best of three between two players will almost always be won by the better player, but in a 12 scenario campaign one streak of bad luck at the wrong time results in either save scumming, or restarting the scenario.
If moving a unit to a location is the best possible move you can make in a scenario where things are about even between two players it shouldn't be possible for the consequences of that decision to utterly screw you because of unlucky RNG calls. In Wesnoth this can happen all the time because the need to maintain veterans all but insures you cant afford to lose things like your high level healers.
Crafting a story line in Wesnoth is next to impossible because it gives you very few options to insure that the player is ready for future challenges. One of your late game scenarios require they have lots of impact damage to survive? Well you'd better contrive some absurd reason for them to only be able to recruit that in this scenario so they can level a few of them up. You end up with absurd video game logic where you have to artificially constrain the player just to hint strongly enough at the needed force compositions.
The game also has extremely non-linear difficulty because being slightly worse at the game gets compounded. If a scenario is made slightly easier, then the campaign ends up much easier because the slightly better resources you get out of that scenario allow you to win the next with fewer losses, and so on. As a result many of the mainline campaigns are either absurdly easy or incredibly difficult.
Finally character development is very difficult. The game forces players to split their army in to bits they give a crap about and cannon fodder. The bit they are supposed to give a crap about is usually too large (~7 would be a good number as this is an amount most folk can keep track of at once, but in most scenarios it is closer to 15 or 20 and it has to be to face the diverse range of threats bigger campaigns throw at you). Meanwhile the low level units you use to screen just become faceless entries in a spread sheet because you bought them specifically to die in your better units place. As a result the player becomes completely detached from the story elements and character. I frequently forget what I'm doing in a scenario outside of the current objectives because world building is virtually impossible.
And the community doesn't respond well to these or any other criticisms. They like the random element, they don't seem to give a crap about characterisation, world build, lore or story telling. They are focused on the mechanics within a scenario. Well if that is their gig then that is their gig, but I honestly regret playing many of the campaigns I've played, I'd rather I had done something else.