i'm curious as to how far you want this to go
Two years ago our thoughts were the following: "We want to get into the game industry. So, based on the game martin-o had been working alone for quite a long time already, we´ll develop a demo of a RTS game on which we´ll work like if it were a professional game. However we must be realistic: We can offer quality, but quantity is out of our reach. We are just four people working for free in our spare time, and we must be modest if we want to get somewhere. That is, we´ll make two factions with a handful of units (as much as to make the game enjoyable, but just as many as we can make in a reasonable amount of time), music, some maps, tilesets, and we´ll make the game easily modifiable so that people can expand it with their own stuff".
And this is what we did, with the additions of the renewed web site by Zanni and the background that I wrote. When we finished our demo we presented the game to the Art Futura award, which we won, and with this we felt that we had got as high as we could with this game and therefore we stopped developing it, besides from debugging and supporting it. Finally, Martin-o thought that making the code open source would be a good idea and so he did.
So the main reason why we stopped developing Glest was that we thought that we had got to the point where the next step forward was too steep, as we are still an amateur group after all. I mean, after the basic structure is made there´s an endless list of things to add, many more than we can honestly handle; but since we already were a working group of people, we decided to keep on doing things and started a different project, that is, Duelfield.
And even though we said "we´re going to take things easy now", the last months we were starting to set a high pace of work, and Felix was a great addition to the team, as a talented modeller and animator as he is. Then, all in a sudden, Martin-o moved to the UK, which means that he now can only work in his scarce free time; at the same time, Hande (por cierto, gracias de parte de todos, te debemos el empuje que le ha dado al juego el que lo dieras a conocer a los linuxeros) decided to make an effort to help us and talked about it in several places, thus reaching the linux users and raising enormously the interest on the game.
Last and most important thing to consider: the Tucho factor. Tucho never stops. Even when we decided to move on to something new, he kept on secretly working in his lair every day and night. From time to time he would say something like... "mmm... if Glest only had horsemen... by the way, know what, I just finished a new unit, the Berserker, wanna see?" and he would show us this great new model, this in between his concepts and textures for Duelfield´s Battlemachines.
So, we all knew that tucho had some things on mind, but it was only in this weeks after martin-o moved that he started to show all the units he had been working on. For some days my reaction was that of "no, no, tucho, we´ve finished, remember, we´re not a game company", but then all in a sudden he comes up with the horsemen, the flying machine, the... the trees I´d been asking for so long!, and I realized that we were again at it, the expansion was in the works. (and almost immediately: "sh*t, we´ll need more voices and I have already asked all my friends"
... really long post... I should write a FAQ...
