Woah, Allacrost was shipped with your distro Pompei2? What distro was that? That's the first time I've heard of our software being included like that. Really cool! Yeah, that version you played was probably one of the demo 0.2.x ones. We're finally done with releasing demos and ar e now moving on to the full game.

Myckel, yeah the reason why it wasn't longer than 20 minutes was because we don't have the artwork yet to create our next map (a castle/town). I've been working on creating artwork for it myself because we have no artists on the team currently doing map art. :( The crab-like boss (its actually a giant scorpion) does need to be improved. Its placeholder art that still needs to be shaded and given detail. Its on our long list of things to do. Also the release you played was a development release, which is basically an unfinished snapshot of what our next release is going to be. We're still missing over half of the maps for that release, so don't worry, there's more to come. :)

Hi everyone. I thought I'd bump this topic since it's been a while. Unfortunately, the project did go through a temporary death for much of 2011 and 2012. I got busy with other things in my life, and so did everyone else so everything kind of stagnated. I've spent the last two months breathing life back into the project and it's now under active development once again. Yesterday I recorded a video showing the current state of the game along with commentary about it and some of the design decisions that we're currently debating on. If you have a few minutes to check it out, the link is below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9scSYkFK5o

I'll be more active in this community again and I'm working on filling in our missing artwork at the moment, both with material from OGA and what I can make myself. If you'd like to help out (in any capacity), we'd be happy to have you. We especially need artists and game designers (people who tie together code and content to make maps, events, etc).

Allacrost is an active project once again. I returned in September after being inspired by the new release of Valyria Tear, our sister project. I've been hard at work and rebuilding a team to finish what we started. We're actually not that far off from being ready to start producing release candidates. Here's a summary of what's going on with Allacrost right now:

• I'm in the process of making vast improvements to our editor and the way in which we store and process map data. Map creation had been far too time-consuming and frustrating of a process and these improvements will make that process so, so much more enjoyable to do.
• The only major hurdles that remain for us to complete this release are to (1) produce our remaining maps, (2) write the scripting for them, and (3) finish the missing art and sound content that we need.
• I've been writing a series of retrospective posts about the history of this project, discussing what decisions were made and why, and chronicaling our mistakes and successes. (Believe it or not, this project is ten years old!). Hopefully it will help others learn how to find success with their own open source projects.

Right now we're shooting to make our next development release (a release snapshot) available in the first quarter or first half of 2015. If we keep our current pace, I think we hae a good shot of achieving that goal. Our Roadmap has been updated, so you can see just how far we've come and what we have left to do before this release is ready. Finally, we could use some additional help. Specifically, we're looking for people with the following skills:

• Map Designer: use our (new and improved) editor to layout maps and write Lua scripts to make them come alive. Really awesome to do because you get to pull in the work that everyone else has done and build the game from those pieces.
• 2D Artists: we use (and contribute) a lot of art from this community, but we always need more. We have one artist right now that is doing a phenomenal job, and he'd love to have someone to collaborate with. To see what type of art we create for Allacrost, check out the Artwork Categories page on our wiki.
• C++/Lua programmer: we have a lot of "nice-to-have" features we'd like to make available in this release. We have a stable, mature, and well-documented code base for you to play with. Whether you're interested in working on the game engine, logic, or scripting, we can surely find something that you'd like to work on.

Thanks! I'll update this thread in the future with any important updates or major releases.

Good question noway. The reason is simply because Tiled didn't exist when our project was started. We already had a working editor and didn't have any reason to change. I considered moving to Tiled a while ago when I was evaluating our options, but we use a special feature in our game that tiled doesn't support, so the choice was between improving our editor or hacking up our own version of Tiled to support that (not to mention we use a different file format). I think our sister project, Valyria Tear, was considering using Tiled at some point as well, but I'm not sure what their current plans are with it.

I do fully support Tiled though and I think it is an awesome tool. I just wish that it came sooner than it did so we could have made use of it.

Well I'm about two weeks away from finishing work on our map editor. It's working great now and is a lot easier to use than it was before. Doing this took longer than I thought it would, but it will pay off in the long run. After this work is complete, I'm going to produce a video demonstrating its use. We never got anyone interested in doing map design work for us, so after I finish that video I'm going to renew efforts to find someone for that.

We did manage to find an artist who did some amazing work for us in a very short period of time. We've had a couple people interested in joining as programmers, but so far no one has made a commitment. Kind of bummed about that to be honest, as I enjoy working with other programmers more than working by myself.

Here's a rough outline of the next steps that we will take and a conservative estimate on when things will be completed:

- Finish map editor work and demo video [End of January]

- Create and script remaining maps [End of February - Mid March]

- Publish development snapshot release [End of March]

There's still a handful of features, artwork, etc. that needs to happen after that, but the main goal right now is to get something playable out there that we can use as a milestone to continually improve until we have something polished enough for an official release.

Here's a video I uploaded tonight demonstrating our vastly improved map editor.  I spent the past several weeks giving it a major overhaul and I'm very pleased with the result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Su31AWg3t4

At the end of last month we published our first release in quite a long time. I made a walkthrough video with commentary if you'd like to watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EX9K1kCF0M

If you want to play it yourself, visit our download page for instructions.

I also updated the About page on our website to describes several of the game's core features and how they enable us to meet our major goals. I did this after receiving some feedback that people visiting the site for the first time still didn't understand what we are trying to create and what's special about it. FYI, our three pirmary design goals are:

• Prioritize efforts on developing engaging gameplay and a compelling narrative
• Eliminate tedious and micromanagement mechanics that are commonly found in RPGs
• Make battles interesting, challenging, and requiring of a high level of strategy from the player

Our next release is planned to be in September. I'll try to remember to update this thread when that gets published.