Below is an excerpt from an interview I recently published with Trent Gamblin of Nooskewl, developers of the Japanese style role playing game Monster RPG 2. The full interview can be found here: Cheesetalks.twolofbees.com
What do you feel motivates proprietary developers to release their projects under Free licences?
I think when you work on a game for 2 years or more you become really attached to it. And after a time, you realize your games aren't going to have a future in them if they stay closed source. So opening up games is a good way to renew interest and extend the life of your creations.
What kind of response have you garnered so far from the Monster RPG 2 crowdfunding campaign?
It's been unbelievably positive. From the first day people have been retweeting my tweets about it, sharing the links with their friends and donating to the campaign. I half expected to be booed off the internet, but people like you and others on gamingonlinux.com, the Allegro forums which I frequent, random people I don't know and my friends have all shown support for it. You know I can't think of a single instance of anyone having anything negative to say about this campaign to me, and I'm used to taking a lot of criticism for my work so it's been a great experience.
What prompted you to consider crowdfunding to support the source release of Monster RPG 2?
I decided I wanted to stop holding the game back when it could be so much more if it were free and open source. I'm still making money at this time from the game, more than I would make over time from the Indiegogo campaign, but I figure it's not worth it when many thousands more people could be enjoying the game for free. Some of them don't have money for foolish things like games. Open sourcing it adds to that. Also the fact that some people may end up using the engine in their own games is exciting and I want to help them do that. I want the game to be in Linux distro repositories where lots of people can access it for free. Maybe some of them will look at the code and be intrigued. There are lots of reasons.
You've recently chosen to reveal the first pieces of information about your in-development action-RPG Baryon. Is there anything you can share with us about the project?
It's big. In games I design I usually try not to make "Monday" games (I'll be surprised if anyone gets that reference :) I aim for something feasible and within my abilities. But Baryon is being "directed" by two friends of mine who have been partners with me since Monster RPG 2. They're really pushing me hard but I'm not hating it. It's a very ambitious game, but they seem to be up for the work (they're also the game's graphics artists). Just half an hour ago I learned of a new feature which I'll apparently be implementing for boss battles: we'll have skeletal animation/tweening like you see in flash for entities in addition to what we have now.
Don't forget that you can read the full interview at Cheesetalks.twolofbees.com and Nooskewl's Monster RPG 2 crowdfunding campaign can be found on Indiegogo.
