Announcing Fortress

Well it seems this blog and the Free Gamer forums combination have had their first interesting side effect!

By wittering about Castles, I inspired forum member gilead to call for volunteers to forge a Castles inspired game! Currently it's in the brainstorming process - everything is up for debate - but a working title 'Fortress' has been agreed and a sourceforge project is undergoing the registration process. Anyway, join in the discussion if you are interested in contributing anything, be it ideas, graphics, code or kittens.

Currently we are looking at writing it in Java (gilead's strongest language and one I'm comfortable with) combined with intergrating Vexi for the UI (Vexi is a rich user interface platform for web apps but could easily be applied to other contexts). Watch this space! (Or join in!)

One of the Wormux devs is putting out some amusing spam. I've seen it in a few places, including the FG forums. Basically they are using a witty parody on spam emails to interest contributors to the project. Wormux is a cool game and just needs the finishing touches applying to SVN to make it really surpass the original Worms games (1 & 2). If you love Worms, help them. :-)

Thanks to SFZ developer ghoulsblade for clarifying that SFZ stands for Stress Free Zone and outlining the goals of the project in a comment on yesterdays FG post.

For me the highlight is the idea of modular ships - that is taking basic components and the player can combine them to make unique ships. In fact, I even suggested this idea to the Vega strike guys a few years back. Yeah, I'm ace. But seriously, I hope to see SFZ make progress because they are combining some really nice concepts that should create a really original game. :-D