A little more than a week ago a guy named Kalle Persson, whom I had only spoken to a few times over the internet about some issues with my computer, asked me if I was interested in helping him build a point-and-click adventure game à la Monkey Island. Since I happen to be incredibly unemployed, and won’t be starting university until this fall, I happily agreed to help him out whatever way I could.

And thus our epic quest to create an epic game about a man on a quest (we’re still working on the specifics) began!

As we both know some degree of Python (he knows a lot more than I do though), the game was going to be written using Python and SDL through Pygame. At first we figured we’d have to build a whole new engine, but then Kalle found this game called Colonel Wiljafjord and the Tarbukas Tyranny by Phil Hassey, and luckily the game engine is licensed under the LGLP! In other words, we can snatch his engine and make it even better!

So now we’re keeping ourselves busy by trying to learn everything there is to know about the engine (Phil seems to be a great programmer in many ways, but commenting clearly isn’t his strongest side), and improving it in whatever way we can. Right now the team consists of:

• Kalle Persson, lead programmer
• Jeff, programmer
• Me, uhm… I guess I’m a junior programmer or something.
• AeroZ, musician
• Bleke, game artist

As I said, we’ve just gotten around to actually improving on the engine. So all the graphics are just placeholders, and we still have a ton of stuff to do. In fact, we don’t even have a name yet. We’re just calling it project Subterranean for now. If you want to get a short sneak peek of what the engine can do, take a look at the video below.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

We’re not quite sure what license the game will ultimately be released under, but you can bet that it’s going to be some type of open source license. It’s being developed under Linux, but as it’s based on Python it can be run on any of the three major platforms. If you want to grab the source and have a look at it, you can do so at our github page. Of course you first need to have installed Python and Pygame on your computer, but if you’re clever enough to get a copy of the source, I think you’re probably smart enough to figure that out yourself. We also have a Wiki if you want to know a little bit about what we’re planning to do to the poor ol’ engine.

If you want to get in touch with us, the best way is to join is in #subterranean at freenode. If you don’t have an IRC client installed, you can use freenode’s java applet - just fill in a name and click connect.

Anyways, I just wanted to let you know what I was up to and get a chance to show off what we’ve got going so far (let the hype begin!). If you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment in the form below this post. Also, if you think our project deserves some publicity, a click on one of those social media buttons would be great.