0 A.D. wins third place in Indie Game of the Year 2009

[Jeru]

3rd Place!

We're pleased to share that 0 A.D. has won third place in ModDB's "Indie Game of the Year" contest for 2009! That means we're the third most voted for game on ModDB out of about eight hundred indies.

First of all, thanks! We feel it's a well-deserved vote of confidence in our endeavor, and we think it helps promote sharing ideas, learning how to develop games and appreciating ancient history. This couldn't have happened without a lot of hard work from our team members and the firm support of our fanbase, and we'd like to thank you all with a big, collective sloppy kiss.

We thought this could be a good occasion to tell everyone a little bit about what we've been doing recently. Consider it an official "state of the game" address.

How ready is the game?

Our programmers say the codebase is about 40% done. But looks can be deceiving: Even though the game has been in development since 2001, progress has been more dependent on effort than on time. As detailed below, just in the course of a few months the game has made a giant leap in progress, most of which is under the hood and is meant to lay the groundwork for future development.

By contrast, the art is very much advanced compared to the game's current stage of development. Art for the Hellenic and Celtic civilizations is pretty much complete, and we've made a great deal of progress on the Roman and Carthaginian civs too. Overall, about all the moving units, like hoplites and cavalry, are done, as well as 70% of the buildings. The bulk of remaining art work is left primarily in the Persian and Iberian civs and modeling things like ships and siege engines.

What's been the recent progress over the last few months?

Our top achievement over the last few months has probably been in the programming department. One of our programmers, Philip, known on the forums as Ykkrosh, has effectively redone one of the most important parts of the game engine, called "simulation". That part is in charge of changing the state of each entity in the "world" represented in the game, like handling harvesting resources, doing damage to stuff and handling death, which our programmers say has been proving particularly tricky. About 15,000 lines of code were changed or introduced in a single codebase update on January 9.

Meanwhile, the art department has mostly been working on the remake of several buildings for the Carthaginians, Persians and Romans. Some new ships has been designed like the Roman quinquereme, the Carthaginian trireme and two Hellenes triremes (not yet released). Also, there have been a lot of work on the animals in the game. About 10 new wild animals have come alive into the game, including African elephants, camels, giraffes, crocodiles, zebras and hawks. Artists have also given attention to the siege engines, advancing them from a primitive state, with the help of some new members.

How much has going OS promoted development so far?

Well, honestly, not quite as much as we had hoped. Most contributions have focused on small bugfixes and getting the game to run on different platforms, which is important in and of itself. But, we're looking for more contributions! And we have an idea how to get them: Making contributions easier and our progress more tangible.

By making contributions easier, we mean we've been working actively on the main development bottlenecks that have been blocking progress, to make it easier for new programmers to get involved - Like simulation, as explained above. Previously, simulation was a buggy patchwork of code, a veritable ball of mud that was difficult for new contributors to understand and debug, and we hope it will be more inviting now.

By making progress more tangible, we mean that over the next few months we intend to start releasing regular, (barely) playable alpha versions. The first of these is set to include very basic implementations of the following features: basic session GUI; pathfinding; construction; resource gathering; combat; enemy AI; victory conditions. They should be more easily installable, without fiddling with SVN or compiling code. And changes to the engine should be easier to implement now that the simulation code is much improved.

We've learned that many contributors start out by fixing a bug they encounter when playing, and that removing barriers makes it more likely for potential developers to try out the game. Also, we're now inclined to believe that regular releases provide a momentum that is very inviting to potential contributors, and we hope all of that works out soon.

Overall, thanks again for your interest in 0 A.D. Everyone is, of course, welcome to get involved. Together, we can make 0 A.D. worthy of awards in 2010 too.

Edited February 5, 2010 by Jeru

[wrut]

Regular releases with installer or just zipped binaries would be great. Though it is not so hard to compile it youself, even for not a programmer, like myself

[Gallaecio]

I would just love a (pre)alpha release, even if it has just the Menu!!! Great work you are doing. Some years from now (when I have programming skills enough), I'll try to contribute to the project somehow, be sure

[phil44]

Congratulations!

[Mythos_Ruler]

The Open Source release actually comes with a pre-built EXE. The fact is just not advertised because the Open Source release is meant for people who want to tinker with the game code and possibly help out.

[Brightgalrs]

Congratulations Wildfire games and contributing parties! Third place, right up there with Natural Selection 2 and Overgrowth! Not bad at all.