We shopped through quite a few game engines, including Unity. Crystal Space met our requirements for a program that is flexible, customizable, mature, and most importantly, has zero up-front costs.
Unity is nice for a commercial project if you have the $1500 it requires for the license, and then another $500 for the team license. We don't. It also requires a separate license for each platform.
We looked at the NeoAxis game engine. It was far less expensive, but also less mature and possibly untrustworthy.
For a long time, we considered the Blender Game Engine. We've been using Blender to model our characters and levels, but the Blender Game Engine is buggy and immature. That's actually how we heard about Crystal Space. The developers of the Blender Open Game project Yo Frankie! used Crystal Space technology in the later versions of the game, eventually completely ditching the BGE in favor of CS.
CryEngine 3 has the same issues as Unity.
Crystal Space has dedicated volunteer developers, some of whom have been working on it since it was launched in 1997. There's daily bug fixes and updates, albeit usually small ones.
CS has also been participating in Google's Summer of Code for at least the past three years, always finishing the program with new features or a more streamlined engine. In fact, I'm looking forward to participating with CS in GSoC 2013. It's backed by an awesome group of people, and I've enjoyed the privilege of chatting with their devs on IRC for the past couple months or so.
Crystal Space's founder, Jorrit Tyberghein, is currently working on a Unity-style "what you see is what you play" editor for the engine called AresEd, which requires no C++ programming. We won't be using it.
One of the reasons for taking on the nitty-gritty, as it were, is to further understand the engine and optimize our game for it; to implement a few features not yet in the engine (features seen in AAA engines like multithreading [CS has multithreading for some parts but the project as a whole is not thread-safe/thread-utilizing; we aim to eventually fix that], antialiasing, SSAO, etc); and finally, to contribute to the development of CS, likely by giving said features back to the engine, for everyone to use.
We don't just want to make our own game and let that be it. We want to make sure the tools are available for those who want to follow in our footsteps, those just as ambitious as we are.
We want to blaze the trail. The trail that leads to a world where indie titles overthrow AAA games, where the power to create a truly immersive entertainment experience is in everyone's hands.
If we fail, at least we'll have learned a few things along the way.
So looking for artists this early on was a mistake. We'll put that on the list.
While this conversation has given my business guy pause on the project (He's ex-Army, probably why his response seemed combative), I still do want to move this forward.
My friend (art) and I, we got together a few months back with this crazy idea:
"Hey dude. You know what we should do? We should make a video game."
We didn't have a concept of an 8-bit scroller or a text adventure game. We wanted to play with the big boys, make another Skyrim or another Dead Space, Amnesia even—maybe another Half Life 2. We didn't have a clue how to make a video game. All we knew is what we thought of those games, where they fell short, what they did well.
So yeah, taking something on of this size is pretty ambitious. Probably immature. The odds are against us.
But all three of us have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this project so far. And all this has done is make it clear that we need to put in a little bit more before we call in reinforcements.
We have yet to agree on how much we're allowing as FOSS, at least for the game itself. We've been discussing letting artists keep the rights to their work, but that can get iffy. We might end up using quite a bit of CC/public domain art if we can't get our own.
Since Crystal Space is LGPL, we can keep our own source code closed, which we'll probably prefer in the long run.
I'm going to be honest. We have zero experience making games—only playing them.
As head of engine and logic, I've been coding off and on for about seven years now, barely more than trivial bits of code written up on a whim, in a smattering of languages.
Our art head has no experience or qualifications besides being able to model better than I can.
We're both recent high school grads.
We have a business major doing the paperwork and crunching the numbers, but he hasn't even graduated college yet.
And he had this response to your reply:
"To me, it makes no difference if we fail. I'd rather fail, and find out what we did wrong so that we won't make that mistake next time. As my business profs say, 'failing forward'."
We're always looking up, and we want people with the same kind of mentality. If people think we're likely to fail or too ambitious, then they have no place with us. You gotta start somewhere, right?
We shopped through quite a few game engines, including Unity. Crystal Space met our requirements for a program that is flexible, customizable, mature, and most importantly, has zero up-front costs.
Unity is nice for a commercial project if you have the $1500 it requires for the license, and then another $500 for the team license. We don't. It also requires a separate license for each platform.
We looked at the NeoAxis game engine. It was far less expensive, but also less mature and possibly untrustworthy.
For a long time, we considered the Blender Game Engine. We've been using Blender to model our characters and levels, but the Blender Game Engine is buggy and immature. That's actually how we heard about Crystal Space. The developers of the Blender Open Game project Yo Frankie! used Crystal Space technology in the later versions of the game, eventually completely ditching the BGE in favor of CS.
CryEngine 3 has the same issues as Unity.
Crystal Space has dedicated volunteer developers, some of whom have been working on it since it was launched in 1997. There's daily bug fixes and updates, albeit usually small ones.
CS has also been participating in Google's Summer of Code for at least the past three years, always finishing the program with new features or a more streamlined engine. In fact, I'm looking forward to participating with CS in GSoC 2013. It's backed by an awesome group of people, and I've enjoyed the privilege of chatting with their devs on IRC for the past couple months or so.
Crystal Space's founder, Jorrit Tyberghein, is currently working on a Unity-style "what you see is what you play" editor for the engine called AresEd, which requires no C++ programming. We won't be using it.
One of the reasons for taking on the nitty-gritty, as it were, is to further understand the engine and optimize our game for it; to implement a few features not yet in the engine (features seen in AAA engines like multithreading [CS has multithreading for some parts but the project as a whole is not thread-safe/thread-utilizing; we aim to eventually fix that], antialiasing, SSAO, etc); and finally, to contribute to the development of CS, likely by giving said features back to the engine, for everyone to use.
We don't just want to make our own game and let that be it. We want to make sure the tools are available for those who want to follow in our footsteps, those just as ambitious as we are.
We want to blaze the trail. The trail that leads to a world where indie titles overthrow AAA games, where the power to create a truly immersive entertainment experience is in everyone's hands.
If we fail, at least we'll have learned a few things along the way.
So looking for artists this early on was a mistake. We'll put that on the list.
While this conversation has given my business guy pause on the project (He's ex-Army, probably why his response seemed combative), I still do want to move this forward.
My friend (art) and I, we got together a few months back with this crazy idea:
"Hey dude. You know what we should do? We should make a video game."
We didn't have a concept of an 8-bit scroller or a text adventure game. We wanted to play with the big boys, make another Skyrim or another Dead Space, Amnesia even—maybe another Half Life 2. We didn't have a clue how to make a video game. All we knew is what we thought of those games, where they fell short, what they did well.
So yeah, taking something on of this size is pretty ambitious. Probably immature. The odds are against us.
But all three of us have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this project so far. And all this has done is make it clear that we need to put in a little bit more before we call in reinforcements.
So be it.
Have a nice day.
We have yet to agree on how much we're allowing as FOSS, at least for the game itself. We've been discussing letting artists keep the rights to their work, but that can get iffy. We might end up using quite a bit of CC/public domain art if we can't get our own.
Since Crystal Space is LGPL, we can keep our own source code closed, which we'll probably prefer in the long run.
I'm going to be honest. We have zero experience making games—only playing them.
As head of engine and logic, I've been coding off and on for about seven years now, barely more than trivial bits of code written up on a whim, in a smattering of languages.
Our art head has no experience or qualifications besides being able to model better than I can.
We're both recent high school grads.
We have a business major doing the paperwork and crunching the numbers, but he hasn't even graduated college yet.
And he had this response to your reply:
"To me, it makes no difference if we fail. I'd rather fail, and find out what we did wrong so that we won't make that mistake next time. As my business profs say, 'failing forward'."
We're always looking up, and we want people with the same kind of mentality. If people think we're likely to fail or too ambitious, then they have no place with us. You gotta start somewhere, right?