Imperialism Remake Community

Hello.

The Imperialist forum fully supports this effort and now has a link on the front page of the forum to the main project site. I am also in the works of creating a large button to sit at the top of the forum page which will sit in between links to Imp 1 and 2 information which will link directly to the Imperialism Remake Page to drive for more awareness

hope this helps

Dylan

...this is more than I would have asked ever. I feel honored. The project will certainly profit from it.

Ha. No worries.

don't feel too honored I am not that big nor is the forum.

Also this project feels like more talk as you have already got a released version going

I am not sure if the project gets the attention it deserves. Getting more members would surely be a good sign. We are linked from a few sites and I am posting with some intervals in some strategy forum places, but the response is always limited.

So, do you know any other place where the chances would be high to find interested people?

At this early stage of development, it's going to be hard. Our build looks promising, but it isn't promising enough to attract people who wouldn't otherwise be interested in an Imperialism reboot.

Also, I feel we lack a clear list of jobs that we need new people to fill. It's easy to say, "We could use more of everything!" but that tends to lead to mass disorganization. We could use more of everything for sure, but first we need some organizational structure that will clearly define the division of labor within specific areas (i.e. we need an artist for specific units, or a programmer for a specific portion of code, or designers to hash out or economic system). If we had a bottomless resource pool, how many people do we need exactly of each skill set?

I would just like to bring forward the following.

I believe going for imperialist players is good, but inadequate. to be brutally honest the amount of strategy game players who have heard of imperialism isn't a measurable minority. the game is old. the remake is new, so it may be a more fruitful endeavor to seek recognition outside of imperialist themed sites. paradox games may be a good place (having Victoria, one of the only other successful economic empire games) and civilization fans might get interested.

the only problem I foresee is the legality of this remake. who owns imperialism? are you allowed to produce a remake? if not increased publicity may be ill-advised.

I believe going for imperialist players is good, but inadequate.

That is the favored philosophy around here as well. What I meant was that there's no reason why we can't build off of a functioning clone of Imp1, considering all of those mechanics will be implemented anyway and we know it will be an enjoyable starting point for testers. Many of the more popular open source games started off as clones of another game and grew beyond that.

who owns imperialism?

Ubisoft, and they aren't interested in selling/licensing for the kind of money we'd be talking about.

are you allowed to produce a remake?

This is... an interestingly grey area. If you remake all of the art assets and reverse engineer the game, and change names so as to not infringe upon trademarks, there is precious little they could do. You could require players own the original games and reuse assets as well (this is what reverse-engineered games like Ultima Online free shards and SWGEmu have done). OpenTT and FreeCiv seem to be doing just fine, and they are far more straight clones than we are shooting for.

Veneteaou wrote:...Also, I feel we lack a clear list of jobs that we need new people to fill. It's easy to say, "We could use more of everything!" but that tends to lead to mass disorganization. We could use more of everything for sure, but first we need some organizational structure that will clearly define the division of labor within specific areas (i.e. we need an artist for specific units, or a programmer for a specific portion of code, or designers to hash out or economic system). If we had a bottomless resource pool, how many people do we need exactly of each skill set?

As very, very often I think you're completely right. We must first finish the detailed game rules decision, and then we will make the organizational plan.

Basically if I would be allowed to dream and we had a bottomless resource pool: 2-4 active and skilled programmers working on different aspects (AI, network communication, GUI, ...) in parallel; 1 active composer for the soundtrack; 3-5 active graphics artists creating/improving on different graphical parts (units, terrain, dialogs, backgrounds, technology sketches, ...); a crowd of more or less active fans who test, give feedback, discuss, promote, ... so 10 really active developers maybe.

One observation is that whenever someone comes along who might be a skilled programmer I mention that the network communication is a big problem for me, but so far this hint was not really noticed. People like to discuss games, but getting people interested in the details of making games is a bit harder.

Alias72 wrote:...the only problem I foresee is the legality of this remake. who owns imperialism? are you allowed to produce a remake?....

that's completely solved. legally we make our own game and are solely inspired by the original. and as Ven said there are many remakes who are even closer.

I have to promote my friend again. He has this flashcard learning app on Android and it is going down in the search results lists again. Since my first mentioning it here it has got more languages inbuilt to automatically create stacks of language cards as well as more statistics about how often you have to repeat a card to really learn it, how much time you spent learning, etc. He even started a blog about it and it's a good app and it's free but still Google is placing him rather low in the search result rankings. So I think that a reference here can not hurt.