Hello everyone.
We are looking for contributors to a free, open-source game for PC. The game is still in its early development but certain results have been achieved already (see below).
The game is called Progressia and its premise is similar to Minecraft. It is a sandbox game about survival and engineering in a realistic voxel destructible world. The player's objectives are to settle and to master various technologies whilst overcoming hunger and unwelcoming climate.
Progressia will be quite like many other games of its genre, namely Minecraft with "industrial" mods, Factorio, Vintage Story and Minetest. The mission of the game is to become an open-source sandbox implementing at the deepest possible level several mechanics not found in the aforementioned games.
The unique features of Progressia will include: compound and highly customizable content (For example, instead of implementing an "iron shovel", a generic "shovel" is hardcoded, capable of being made out of "iron". Or "glass". With obvious consequences.); materials and technologies implemented close to realistic; an Earth-scale world without fantastical elements; an approximately accurate temperature calculation; RPG-like player stats and a health system; tiles to be placed between blocks; a multithreaded server. An abstract implementation is known for each point of this list. Details can be found
here.
Little is determined about the graphical design. In-world graphics will be pixelated, probably photorealistic; a minimalistic pixelated UI is planned. Audio design has not been addressed yet as there isn't yet anyone with even a hint of experience in the field. There will be no plot and the setting will not be developed.
Progressia's target audience are those who play modded Minecraft or modded Factorio. The game will be challenging; however, care must be taken not to make it irritatingly hard. The difficulty will be balanced for a cooperating group of 2-4 people, although singleplayer mode will be available as well.
It is essential that the project is free and open-source. Progressia's code and assets are licensed under GPL. This is a non-commercial effort so we don't count on getting any money.
Progessia doesn't use a game engine, mainly due to far too specific requests. Appropriately licensed game engines are also a rarity. The main programming language is Java. C#, C++ nor Brainfuck are used because Java provides platform neutrality guarantees, convenient concurrency, reflection and self-modification. The latter two are especially useful for developing complex mods. Java is also the language of Minecraft, which means that a large community of potentially interested capable developers already exists. And, well, yeah, Java is teamlead's faviorite language, so there's that.
Modern OpenGL, OpenAL and GLFW are the backend. LWJGL serves as a wrapper library. It is the same that Minecraft uses. We only plan to support PC platforms: GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS. Mobiles, consoles and web are far more than we can chew.
In order to prove to others - and ourselves - that Progressia is serious business, we have prepared a kind of a demo of what has been made so far, the "techdemo". Please note that the "techdemo" IS IN NO WAY a demo of the game, its engine or even its prototype; it merely prooves that we are not just script kiddies. So don't judge the game by the "techdemo".
"Techdemo" can be downloaded from our
GitHub. The link offers a crossplatform JAR and a couple of simple installers. The "techdemo" has been tested on Win10, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora; it fails on MacOS. JRE (Java runtime) 8 or newer is required. Universal JAR is portable; Debian package installs the game into /usr/share/. In all cases the JAR needs to be run manually; no shortcuts are created yet. (To run a JAR file, just open it with Java, which is often the default action when double-clicking the file.) There are some coded but used features at the moment: a GUI system, world saving and server concurrency.
There's a video showcasing the "techdemo":
At the moment, the following team develops Progressia in their free time:
- Javapony aka OLEGSHA, the team leader and a programmer;
- ExceptNullpointer, a programmer;
- serega404, a programmer;
- WarDreg, a graphics designer;
- Roboad, a graphics designer;
- infirms, a programmer.
Valelya has helped create installers but has since left the group.
None of the aforementioned are experts and this is the first big project for most of us. We welcome all enthusiasts regardless of skill level and free time. The development promises to be fun at the very least; it will probably give all of us some good experience, and, we hope, might result in something decent.
That said, we are especially interested in:
- OpenGL developers to at least give a piece of advice in low-level graphics code;
- a lead graphics designer;
someone at least remotely familiar with sound design or - dare we ask - a composer;- game designers to guide the others from making high-quality yet unplayable crap.
So far the workflow has been organized with Telegram, Discord and partially with GitHub but we will probably need to switch to something more adequate soon. Those interested in contributing can leave messages here, chat with team leader Javapony in
Telegram or join our fresh
Discord server. Come to Progressia, we have cookies.
Our GitHub repository is
https://github.com/OLEGSHA/Progressia/.
Thank you.
Jobs
