Intentions, or how things started

There are some reasons i started this game project. The first reason was to write a game from scratch for learning purpose. This turned into a full project one by one and more and more people became interested. The second reason has to do with my ambition towards dragons. I don't like how they are portrayed in general as blood lusty beasts as they deserve more respect. Thus I want to show dragons how they are: no monsters, no saints but normal living beeings, although interesting and impressive ones. The third reason has to do with Linux and the missing attractivity for games. Many game engines are made for windows and even if there exist ports they are often troublesome and more of a hack than a native port. Thus I decided to create an engine that is crossplatform from the very beginning but with its roots on Linux. Furthermore i wanted to use an engine for my game project that is very flexible in adapting to new operating systems, graphical APIs or even new capabilities of coming graphic card adapters and easy to work with.

And then there is also another reason which applies to the content of the game. Looking on the game market you find today nearly only games with excessive violence where killing and lots of blood is the only thing that seems to attract gamers. I never really liked this tendency of games, especially considering the real world violence going on day by day. For this reason i decided to make a game that is opposed to this and shows that you do not need to kill to deal with your troubles. Perhaps you know MacGyver. His way of dealing with troubles is interesting and sometimes a bit strange but he showed what many are missing today: the will to do it without guns and bombs. The player has a selection of different character in his Team and some do not touch weapons at all if possible. The game will allow you to live out your creativity in finding solutions for your missions. It is astonishing but judging after the mass of violence on the game market one would expect such a game to have no chance but nearly everybody i showed this concept was eager to see the results. It looks like many people out there would like to play a game where they can do the most crazy things to solve their missions without having to shot at everything that moves. And that is where the final goals or Intentions for this project emerged from:

• Provide an environment dynamic enough to give the player a lot of freedom in how he solves his missions.
• Restrict in a natural way lethal weapon usage to encourage the player to be creative.
• Creating a Game Engine suitable for this task and any possible upcoming enhancements.

The Free-Software movement and Epsylon

With Game Projects the question if the game will be commercial is asked very often. A lot of games started out as community project and ended somehow in a commercial setup. As a true linuxian I adher to the Free-Software philosophy and want to provide the finished game later on under this star. Now if it comes to Free-Software or the more known Open-Source the heat rises quickly. Most people see this as a danger to commercialisme or other silly ideas about the end of world. The main trouble in this entire situation arises as most people do not know what Free-Software really means and that it is not a danger to Closed-Source products. In the word Free-Software is hidden the word free like in free-dom not free-beer like many people belief. The meaning of this is simple. Free-Software is about giving the costumer back his rights on the software he owns, namely the right to access the source code, use, modify or redistribute the product. It does not mean though that you are not allowed to charge for this all. Important on Free-Software is that the sources are available to the people out there, not that it has to cost nothing. For more informations and a much more in depth explenation of the entire Free-Software philosophy i really recommand all you to read the Free-Software Page. Especially pay attention to the 'Selling' paragraph as this is what most people do not understand off the bat.

Now what does this all have to do with Epsylon? I want to release the Game later on using this free-software principle. This means that the project will be licensed under the General Public Licence (GPL) and distributed according to it. I plan to provide apart from a download service also selling of hard-copies if possible. Now why should somebody wanna buy a hard-copy if he can download it (the typical argument of the opposition to free-software)? Although today a lot of people have higher quality internet acces not everywhere this is the case. A majority of people still browse the internet with a dialup modem. Imagine downloading a cd-rom huge data file over a 56k line. Instead of taking those hazzels they can simply acquire a hard-copy and in the same time support us. Also a lot of people are not technic genious. The success of windows for example has been due to the fact that you can simply buy it, slam the cd-rom into your computer and let it do the rest. Those people also prefer buying a hard-copy that they can simply insert into their computer and install it without having to deal with downloading isos, buring them or simplistic installation interfaces. Besides this there also exist people that prefer hard-copies as creating your own hard-copies is not always untricky. Also in the case of buying it they can exchange faulty medias or receive support. Providing those serivces at a charge is encouraged by the Free-Software philosophy. Thus the customer can choice for himself if he wants to buy a copy or acquire it otherwise. Remember that Free stands for Free-dom. I want to give the customer this freedom.