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| Link |
Ever since the announcement of Project Durian, with its press release stating the aim of making a dark fantasy film aimed at young adults, I've been dreaming of the game they'll make using the assets and setting. The more the project developed, the more I drooled over the potential; it had all the necessary prerequisites for a fantasy action game/rpg: an epic quest, awesome fighting scenes, dragons...
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| Screen from the Sintel Open Movie |
But time passed and nothing showed up; the Blender Foundation showed no plans for another official Blender Game Engine project... Until a bunch of unaffiliated Blender artists decided to have a crack at making the project themselves without the official sponsorship of the Foundation, and started the Sintel The Game project (yay Free Culture).
Free Gamer has been a bit tardy in these developments though, the Sintel the Game project started just before July last year and have gotten pretty far in that time (a bit further than the Apricot/YoFrankie project? /snark).
One thing that I find worrying about the project is their closed development process and uncoordinated web presence. There isn't an open repository where people can view the progress of code development, a forum where a community can grow and contribute, an IRC channel where developers can chat (disclaimer: I might be wrong on these; but their site doesn't indicate that any of these rather essential open development services exist; which is a rather big communication failure).
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| Seriously ^ |
On top of this game has been a bit sparse on news updates; they have a Facebook Group that is a bit more active than their blog; but both are updated far from daily. Rather worrying indeed.
They seem to be following the YoFrankie development model, the two sites are almost identical in the information which they provide; and we all know how that turned out...
Nevertheless; the game still looks incredibly promising. It succeeding, however, wouldn't be a victory for open game development; only for open games.
