Interview with a 0 A.D. Developer

With thanks to Constantinos of the greek Linux site OSArena, he sent me a request to publish an interview he did with 0 A.D's Aviv Sharon.

The interview is as follows (my own comments after):

Tell us about who you are and what do you do exactly for 0 A.D.

My name is Aviv Sharon, I am 24 years old from Haifa, Israel. I am a university student, soon to be a high school science teacher, and a volunteer contributor to 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. My contributions focus mainly on maintaining relations with fans and potential contributors.
I am one of a team of >20 contributors collectively called Wildfire Games, which is a fancy name for the 0 A.D. development team. We hold on to it because it keeps a connection with Wildfire Studios, the Age of Empires II modding team that was our predecessor.
We have many different types of contributors from all over the world: a professional composer recording himself and friends playing the bouzouki and the tin whistle at his home studio, a sound team recording sounds of water splashing and doors creaking, programmers grappling problems from drawing borders on the map to fine-tuning the AI’s strategy, and artists modeling Carthaginian merchant ships, animating giraffes and texturing ancient temples.
We are high school students and Ph.D. candidates and everything in between, but we all love contributing to this project in our spare time.

What is the state of the game? I mean the version number is »alpha 6» and the game is pretty much playable. How many more alphas before an actual 1.0?

We have certainly come a long way in a short time, and excitement both from developers and fans has risen accordingly. But we’d like to take this opportunity to make it clear that there is still quite a bit of work left for 0 A.D., so some patience is definitely in order.
The game has many rules implemented, but not all: There is no research, no auras, no formation bonuses, etc. The artwork for three of the factions set to be included in the game has been completed (Hellenes, Celts and Iberians), but the artwork for the other three are either underway or in planning (Carthaginians, Persians and Romans). Multiplayer mode works, but the host has to provide an IP address. The single-player mode has a basic computer opponent AI, but it still has much room for improvement. Many unit stats are still unbalanced. And there’s more.
We hope to finish the game by late 2012 but cannot promise because the pace of development is so unpredictable. We don’t know exactly how many alphas and betas it will take until then. We’re taking it one step at a time, and so far that approach has been working quite well.

The game is free of charge and open-source. Is this going to change in the future?

0 A.D. will always be free, both as in gratis and as in software and cultural freedom: From the codebase and development tools, through the unit statistics, the artwork, the music score and the sound effects, to the stories of the scenarios and campaigns. We will never change this. (The licenses are irrevocable anyway.)
Anyone is free to use the 0 A.D. engine, called «Pyrogenesis», and release new games that build upon it. This is true even if they include their own proprietary artwork and storyline instead of our free ones, and sells that for a profit. That is fine by us, as long as the source code is still released as the GPL stipulates.

I believe that 0 A.D. is one of the very few strategy games that show the world that free of charge can be as good as company developed strategy game paid products. Why do you believe there are so few good strategy games for free? Also we see many abandoned projects. Why is this happening?

It’s quite easy to name some common reasons why online collaborative projects fall apart and are abandoned: Loss of motivation and commitment, poor management, major disagreements, and plain lack of time due to real life constraints.
The more ambitious a collaborative volunteer internet project is, the more specialized people, time and coordination it requires, the less personnel turnover it can tolerate — and the more likely it is to be abandoned. And strategy games like 0 A.D. are very ambitious. They involve a very wide variety of disciplines – lots of programming (low-level coding, high-level architecture, networking, scripting, UI, 3D graphics, etc), and art (texturing, modelling, animating), and audio, and gameplay design, etc. So you’ll get stuck if you don’t have people specializing in all those areas almost simultaneously to get a well-rounded game, with both a good engine and pleasing artwork. Few other types of application need such a wide range of expertise. Thankfully, we have had quite little turnover, but over a decade, contributors do finish school, get married, have children, and generally have less time to contribute to 0 A.D.
Also, most applications can be useful in a very early primitive version, then incrementally improved by adding features to make them more useful to current users or more widely useful. Games are generally not fun to play before they’re completed, so there’s very little of that incremental development. So there’s less short-term benefit to working on the project, so fewer people do so; and you need to maintain a clear coherent widely-agreed vision over many years to avoid drifting off course and never reaching completion.
Simpler indie games for Linux, like 2D platformers, are much more likely to be completed. They focus on a simple core gameplay idea and keep the game’s scope very limited, so both the end is nearer in sight throughout development and the game is playable sooner. Our ambition to try to compete with commercial games that had dozens of people working for three years has landed us in years of near stagnation, which we were lucky to overcome.

Tell us about the community behind the project. Is the community large enough? Is the contributed work flowing well?

Thankfully, we have support from thousands of fans from around the world who keep showing interest in the game and cheering us on. More people join us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our forums every day. Also, we have been welcoming more contributors to the team recently, particularly in the programming department, which is really crucial for us. Is the community large enough, too small, or too large? We haven’t really thought about it. We are thankful for each fan and contributor, and we are always ready to welcome more.

In what areas would you ask for help from new contributors?

We are looking for programmers proficient in C++ and/or JavaScript, for OpenGL, AI and gameplay development. And we need artists, both 2D and 3D, with a special emphasis on 3D modelers and animators.
For the game’s promotion, we would like to design a new website for 0 A.D. and are seeking one or more experienced web designer(s) for that purpose. Also, we need people to help record video clips of the game and edit them into promotional and educational videos, like a trailer or a video explaining how some game mechanic works. Instructions for those interested are available here.

What are the main problems a free open source game like 0 A.D. has?

We discovered the hard way that the first draft of anything is seldom good enough: We had to re-do large portions of the game engine and many art assets that were, well, ugly. We have to keep maintaining a balancing act between creativity (being open to criticism, suggestions and requests from fans, working on fun side-projects, etc.) and staying on target as the design document from 2003 laid out. We have to coordinate our efforts around milestones and keep in touch with fellow team members in very different timezones, sometimes synchronously over MSN and IRC. And there’s much more.

We linux users are thirsty for good native games. Big game developers and studios don’t port their games to linux. Is it that difficult or time consuming for you?

Since 0 A.D. was planned to be cross-platform from the start, and Linux has been more available to us for testing and debugging, it’s not a big deal. Also, developers from the FOSS world have proven to be very helpful with 0 A.D. packaging for the various distros. By comparison, Mac OS has been proven to be much harder for us to support, and we are still seeking a Mac OS developer to help us make a consistently good 0 A.D. binary for that platform.

Well there you have it folks, a very good and quite in depth interview (I am more than a little jealous, i would love to interview someone from the 0 A.D. team!).

I am holding very high hopes for 0 A.D. as well, since it could be quite a game changer (think of all the people who love to AOE games for Windows - there is currently nothing like it for Linux), we already have the Spring RTS engine but this one is completely 100% original and quite different. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.