Original Post
Team name: The Dirty South Project name: The Dirty South Brief description: See below. Target aim: See below. Compensation: Satisfaction Technology: C++, OpenGL, SDL, GTK (?) // Win32, Macintosh, Linux Talent needed: Fluent in writing C++. See below Team structure: See below Website: http://ztds.sourceforge.net Contacts: Please read this post before contacting me! My email address is at the bottom. Additional Info: See below!! Feedback: Go for it. ^ The required template. Below is the project in more thorough detail. Summary: Forgive the long post, but I've got a lot I have to say here. I'll try to summarize here before I get started: Inpsired by one of the greatest games ever concieved, The Legend of Zelda, I wish to make a flexible game engine that can be used to create graphics-rich 2d, top down adventure / RPG games. For a short while I made a game on my own which is hosted at http://ztds.sourceforge.net. but decided my code was sloppy and that I needed more people to achieve the goals I wanted. If you are interested in helping I encourage you to contact me but be mindful that I will be rather choosey, as I'll explain later. The Project's History: The game that you will find available for download (only for win32) at http://ztds.sourceforge.net began as a quest to recreate Zelda. I didn't really know what I was doing but I had some specific goals. I wanted to pretty much recreate a game which would play exactly like A Link to the Past, but I also wanted to eventually create a level editor. About the time that I started considering artificial intelligence, I realized my code was just too sloppy and too much needed to be done to approach it single handedly. At this point I put a post up here on GameDev and applied for a Sourceforge project hosting. The hosting was denied and I re submitted with a little more detail about the game. Shortly later it was accepted and I started looking for more people. I gathered 2 and we started discussing the technicalities of the game for about three weeks. At this point we decided to get started. Here things fell apart. The game progressed to the point where an image could be displayed on the screen, would animate, and would move based on input. Then autumn approached and people disappeared, leaving some very unfinished code around. Once I was able to confirm that I was on my own again, I began looking for more help; this time I wanted a few more people, an wanted to make sure people knew C fairly well. I found a few more and we tried to salvage the code that was available. In retrospect, it probably would have been better to start over. It wasn't long before the same thing happened again, this time with an even worse CVS. The Project's Future: So now I'm left with a trainwreck of a project, but I still have a very strong vision and desire to make things happen. The project will most certainly be scrapped and we will be starting from scratch. I want to find a team of dedicated programmers. Rather than a couple people to fill in here and there, I wish to find a larger team of about ten people. I'd like to have some sub-teams of people who will be working on various aspects; at the moment namely the game itself and the level editor. Later I'd like to have people working on graphics, scripts, sounds, and eventually a well designed website. The first thing on the list is to find a team of people; potentially yourself included. I will begin cleaning up the website, forums, mailing list, CVS, etc. and we will start over. After finding some interested people, we will begin discussing how things will work as well as coding conventions, etc. Then we'll begin working. I'm looking for lots of structure this time around regarding who does what and what's being done in what order etc. Who I'm Looking For: You don't necessarily have to have made any games before or even have any experience with graphics (namely OpenGL). You will need to know C++ and have some experience with it. Above all, you need a passion to make this game, and an anticipation of sticking with it, even if things aren't moving at an exciting pace. If you haven't played Zelda before, go play it! It's a very definitive game. Let me re-emphasize that you need to be dedicated to the game! I don't expect you to spend all of your free time on it, but if you can't spare at least a couple hours in a week, you're too busy for this project. If you are just interested in graphics or sound, or web design, let me know, but I'm focused now on programmers. Licensing etc: In the past the license has been GPL. This will probably be the case in the future, but in the spirit of starting from scratch I'd like to entertain other licenses. The language will be C++ for the game, and probably for the editor as well though I'm open to using Java. Hosting has been provided by Sourceforge and we will use CVS as well as their mailing list etc. It would also be nice to have people in #ztds on irc.freenode.net. Contacting me: If you have questions or comments about the project, go ahead and post a reply here. It would be nice to have a dicussion going. If you are interested in helping, shoot me an email at stephelton@gmail.com.