This game will always hold a special place in my heart. Back when I was 17 I got hospitalized (nothing serious or life-threatening) for a couple of months and back then I didn't have internet everywhere or a smartphone to keep me company. My parents had brought my laptop to me but having no internet was really really boring. I had Linux installed but, alas, in 2006-2007 there weren't many Linux games to keep me company. Luckily after some time I remembered I had downloaded this "Wesnoth" game a few months before, so I started playing it.
Boy, it was a blast, for weeks and weeks I played all the scenarios and campaigns and I got really good at it. Every now and then I go back to it even today, just to play a few scenarios.
I met the main developers at Fosdem this year and they are great people, they are doing an amazing job with this game. Kudos to them.
I met those guys at fosdem as well some years ago. It was a small game-dev room, they stayed through all the presentations having their miniature hack-session throughout the whole time :-)
It was great. Remember that one of them had a great presentation about importance of designing their game in data and not in code, to allow non-developers to participate.
Were you stuck in a hospital bed all that time without any chance to go out, see your friends, breathe fresh air or even eat food properly?
I managed to read around 10 books in the first week I was hospitalized, my parents didn't know what to provide me anymore because I just tore through every piece of literature I could find.
This is really strange because I read that chapter before checking HN and to my surprise its here. The chapter is a great read and gives some ideas on how to architect a game, especially one that you want the players themselves to contribute too.
A similar game hooked me on programming at an early age. It's called Graal and you had to pay to contribute. I wish I had found this game instead.
I'm wondering the same thing. Also, this is not even close to new. My understanding is that it has been open source and freely available for quite some time.
I've just discovered that one of the biggest contributors [1] is Eric S. Raymond [2], who is the author of The art of UNIX programming [3] and one of the open source contributors of all time I admire most.
While I don't play anymore, I used to play this game quite often. It is an absolute blast to get a few friends together, hop on a Skype call, and spend the night playing. Glad to see the game is still under development!
I started playing Wesnoth in 2005. Practised 'programming' in WML to make custom maps. There was one I designed called 'DOTW' which was a rip off from DOTA. For a good few weeks it was the most played map in Wesnoth multiplayer. Good times.
This is a great game and runs fantastic on older systems. I've turned more than one old and "useless" laptop into a Wesnoth/ScummVM/mp3 player box in the past and they work fantastic.
This is also about as close as you're going to get to a native Advance Wars game on PCs. If you've played any of the AW games (GBA and DS) you'll know how addictive they can be.
I love this game. I have not played it in a few years (have not played any games in a few years) but this was my absolute favorite somewhere around 2007-2009. A great amount of careful thought went into this game, and you can tell when you play. Also the width of the community ensures a diversity of scenarios.
And I couldn't even access the developer's website (www.androthsoft.com). If the money went to the authors/official website I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but in the current situation I'd rather circumvent the official download channels...
The "Is that legal?" question is extremely complicated because you're looking for a positive answer in a marketplace full of a bazillion theoretical negative answers. They're not "selling GPL without releasing the source" as long as github doesn't go out of business. Is it legal, in the sense that there used to be a raging debate if your agreement to sell on the apple store was invalid thus illegal if you "sold" GPL'd software, which I stopped caring about once I got rid of my last iDevice and went all Android, so it may or may not be legal to "sell" GPL software on at least some app stores. Another app store example, for no reason I'm aware of, wesnoth used to be stuck in the incoming queue on fdroid, I donno why or if that was ever resolved or if it had anything to do at all with the license.
"If the money went to the authors/official website I'd buy it in a heartbeat"
Along with about 500 other people. I suppose paying one of the 500 is superior to paying none of them. Personally I think the work he did to port is worth a "tip" so I paid for it a long time ago.
I have never liked purely deterministic, non-random games. I think part of it is that they encourage analysis paralysis--if I know that a single mathematically perfect move exists, I'm not happy unless I can find it; I'm more willing to settle for "good enough" and move on with the game if I know that even a perfect move can be derailed by the dice, and even a bad one might luck out.
And part of it might be that non-randomness seems sort of cold and sterile and inhuman to me. Sometimes, you do everything right and you still fail. That's the human condition.
And then, meaning no offense, the kind of players who are put off by luck sometimes rub me the wrong way. They often seem to put way too much of their personal self-worth on the outcome of a game. I'm all for rigorous fairness in things that matter, things that affect people's lives, but this is supposed to be a relaxing diversion.
I can totally understand that, it's definitely a preferential thing. I do like some randomness, but overall I prefer having a lot of different choices, and the challenge of trying to work out the optimal one. I think I prefer that feeling of "analysis paralysis" to having your work completely undone by an unlucky dice roll or card draw. Plus, the feeling of satisfaction of forming a creative strategy or tactic is awesome.
I've recently gotten into boardgames, and the ones I enjoy the most follow this line of thought (in particular Caylus and Terra Mystica).
In games with random element a single mathematically perfect move exists as well (it needs to be computed as an expected value over the randomness), which can make the games even more prone to analysis paralysis (ex. poker players pondering a single move for up to 15 minutes).
If you fight the right way (cover every units' back, use beefier units to guard weaker ones) you don't suffer from bad luck nearly so much because you don't hang on the edge and can stand few bad blows.
If you remove the morality and ethical language, I have had some fun answering questions experimentally along the lines of "is it even theoretically possible even with save scumming to (insert unusual and adventurous idea/tactic here)" Yes I'm quite literate and I understand the scenario is trying to railroad me into following a certain very narrow track of gameplay, but I want to explore well outside that narrow track. Or rephrased, my idea of a fun "narrow track of tactics" doesn't map identically to a scenario designers "narrow track of tactics"
This is a fundamental moral / ethical difference between computer based (mmo)RPGs and paper/pencil RPGs, on the computer creativity is seen as inherently wrong, and on paper/pencil creativity is seen as correct. There's probably a startup idea or two buried in there. The world already has too many rules lawyer paper games, but a computer game that rewards creativity without turning into a themeless story free sandbox is a somewhat unsolved problem. There do exist some, especially historical, but to say its an underserved market would be an understatement.
I remember something about an option turn_limit: -1 to shut off turn limits, I went thru a phase of "can 3 archers win the scenario" and the answer was often yes, but it sometimes exceeded the totally arbitrary turn limit.
You can create a whole new game out of the intended game that way where it turns into something like a counterinsurgency game where you battle for the hearts and minds (well, at least the hearts) of the gold generating villages.
There's a lot of interesting railroad track in the game, but if you step off the tracks there is also interesting land that doesn't have a track on it, thats not even on the map. It can be turned into an imperfect sandbox, and that itself is a metagame to find the "best" way to convert it.
While you shouldn't need to at lower difficulties or on easier campaigns, you can always quick save before a move or at the end of your turn and reload if you didn't like the result of your move or the enemy moves. Do it a lot in the early scenarios to build up hero unit reserves and see if you can make it through later scenarios without reloading. Mark the turn start save and try a strategy, if it fails go back to that turn instead of starting over. And note that if your strategy is poor, continually reloading alone won't let you win. (Unless maybe you spend a crap ton of time waiting for positive outcomes of minuscule-probability events...)
Edit: I remembered a quote I liked from early on in Iain Banks' The Player of Games. While I still like chess (and take issue with the notion that reality is built on chance, rather than our predictive measurements of reality restricted to chance due to us being part of reality not outside it) I thought this was a pretty great put-down of games without chance at all:
"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains make-able, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.
"The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time."
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
This technique has a (derogatory) name in the world of strategy games, "save scumming". I think in a single player game, the only thing that matters is that the player has fun.
It is more common practice in games like RPGs, but less looked down upon, since certain quest lines and story elements are mutually exclusive. Think of the typical choice of being a "good" or "evil" character, and how they sometimes lead to different subquests.
It's a bad thing if you only think about winning the current scenario with the least amount of skill involved. It's a very good thing though if you are using it to experiment and learn strategies and mechanics in a single player game.
Basically, yeah. Since this only applies to single player, if it doesn't affect your personal enjoyment (or if it can actually increase it), why care that it's cheating? Personally I find victories with a lot of reloading / other methods of cheating somewhat hollow, so I try to avoid it. Except sometimes I just want to advance the storyline and try a different scenario, maybe come back to that pain-in-the-ass one later (it's especially great to do that when you have a 'eureka' moment in general strategy that you find out in later scenarios). Or in Wesnoth specifically, I think there are some campaigns that are just about unwinnable even with gratuitous reloading unless you did particularly well on the previous N scenarios; I don't want to waste time replaying previous scenarios that I didn't do so great on but that I still won, at least not so soon. That would just decrease my enjoyment of the game.
Also in a sense save points are a cheat -- back in the Ikaruga and Contra 3 and Asteroids days, if you lost, you lost! Start over. Great fun for me at least. :) Now we have saves, and the enjoyment of the game comes from other areas besides committing to muscle memory a movement sequence that beats a level with a certain score, and someone opposed to saves can always just not save or not load from an autosave... Having quick saves just takes having saves to its logical conclusion of decreasing wasted player time. You have to find your own limits for what constitutes cheating yourself out of entertainment, but if you've ever thought "thank god I saved before I tried doing X" or "damn it last time I saved was hours ago" you might want to give shorter save-load durations a thought.
I can't speak to multiplayer, but one of the most interesting parts of the game is thinking about how to approach each scenario so that even when things take a turn for the worse, the units you lose are expendable.
This means things like purchasing low tier units to pad your ranks, not positioning key units where better-than average odds will take them down, and occasionally sending out a sacrifical lamb to prevent your lines getting broken.
I think a save at the start of each scenario provides a good balance of tension. If you reach for the save/reload buttons every turn, you'll tend not to learn the skills you need to play successfully and enjoyably.
Occasionally you'll hit a wall where it seems like you have to rely on unusually good luck to succeed. This is usually a signal that you've either lost too many key units, or that your composition isn't right for the campaign. That just means it's time to replay at an earlier point with your new knowledge.
Definitely. The question of luck is always something which pops up in the forums now and again. The answer is always the same, it was a deliberate choice to have an element of luck, it keeps things interesting and forces your strategies to be more error-prone. Yes, among top-level players, luck may sometimes decide the fate of a game, but that is a price they decided to pay for the results =)
That's the main reason I don't like it. I'm too consistently unlucky to play games that hinge on luck.
I do agree that it would become a lot less interesting at high-level play without luck, though. That's pretty much the price you pay for having turns, as a game designer.
You realize that is a bet on the fact that I'll lose, right? What makes you think that my luck wouldn't apply to that?
I recognize that you think I'm stupid, and I recognize that I haven't actually provided you with the hard data. But I'm not sure how that justifies trying to use someone's depression as a tool for profit.
Are you this much of a dick to everyone? Or am I just unlucky?
I believe in testing things. I don't expect it to work since I assume that it's much more likely you fall within the normal range of luck, but I think doing the experiment would be interesting.
The central point is that if you have an unusual source of information about chance outcomes, even if it's negative, there should be a way to use that to gain.
If you think that the universe can make sure you don't gain financially from chance you could try a test that pits some other kind of gain against financial gain and see which way the universe goes. Some people bet against their favourite sports team so that whatever the result, at least some good will come of it.
I'm a web developer. In terms of luck, that's a pretty high water mark for financial gain.
You believe in testing things, and for some reason, you don't seem to consider the many games I've played with luck components to be tests, but somehow gambling is a legitimate test because money is involved? Why?
> The central point is that if you have an unusual source of information about chance outcomes, even if it's negative, there should be a way to use that to gain.
I do gain. I learned not to play games that depend on luck. I learned that deliberately subjecting myself to depressing situations was not conducive to mental health.
It sounds like this is not a healthy approach for you, so I retract my suggestion. I will defend it somewhat though, hopefully to give you an idea why I immediately started thinking along those lines:
> You believe in testing things, and for some reason, you don't seem to consider the many games I've played with luck components to be tests, but somehow gambling is a legitimate test because money is involved? Why?
Actually, it's more that the gambling scenario brings in an extra level. Learning what the universe is like is usually very useful. If I thought that the universe were against me in games of chance, there would be a whole load of follow up questions - is it just me, or are there others like me? How many? Are there others opposite to me? How would it work if I followed a lucky persons bets? How predictable is its behavior? Does the effect get stronger with larger amounts wagered? What are it's limitations? Can it identify schemes at one level removed? If they go wrong, do they go wrong because I start winning at the game, or because of higher level scenarios (like the friend I trusted reneges on the deal)? Is my knowledge of the scheme important? What if the friend chooses on a case by case basis whether to mimic me or to oppose me and I don't know which they will do?
One of the first few things I would try, would be to try to trick the effect somehow, leading to the friend/casino scenario I suggested. The money aspect is not to cause the test to be legitimate, but as an extra incentive to myself to seek the truth of the matter. This wouldn't work with everyone, and may not work with you, but I think it would help me stay objective.
Anyway, particularly if you find yourself with mental health concerns, avoiding games of chance (and particularly those involving money) is probably wise. The only reason I've continued with this discussion so far, is because you seem to have mistaken my enthusiasm for testing outlandish claims with baiting, and I'm trying to explain that that isn't it at all.
I think it uses the art, or at least was heavily inspired... seems to be something there, but the original programmer moved on to do this ccg instead. https://github.com/davewx7/Citadel (It's still a work in progress, though.)
I don't play the standard Wesnoth scenarios very often anymore, but because Wesnoth has a full scripting language in it to construct custom scenarios, people have invented whole new games for it.
I personally enjoy the "SurvivalX" family of single-unit multiplayer RPG campaigns: you have a party of adventurers, one unit per player, that gain experience and gold through combat, and can develop skills, spells, abilities, new weapons, and otherwise become more powerful, leading up to large boss fights against the leaders of the opposing armies. And when you lose your one unit, you lose.
RPG scenarios provide a very different feel from the standard game of Wesnoth, but personally I enjoy them far more.
Boy, it was a blast, for weeks and weeks I played all the scenarios and campaigns and I got really good at it. Every now and then I go back to it even today, just to play a few scenarios.
I met the main developers at Fosdem this year and they are great people, they are doing an amazing job with this game. Kudos to them.