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[announcement] Future of WTactics

Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2016 19:08
by snowdrop
Six years have passed since WTactics.org was founded as a one man project, with the very not so humble vision of creating something truly amazing that the gaming world had yet to see: A pro looking, interesting and full featured customizable card game (CCG) that could compete with it's commercial counterparts, with the crucial difference that it would be truly free and open source - a creation by players, for the players.

We set out on a project that had the game and fun as it's objective instead of profits, a project that would never depend on a specific company being around, resulting in a game that would be alive, evolve and be spread as long as the player base itself wanted it, allowing every person to do as he/she may, making it a community powered entity.

During the years of active, dormant and semi-active development about 15 persons contributed in kindness with plenty of their knowledge, work, skills and ideas. Some of them are even still around. Special mentions go out to dev. Luke Jastrzebski (Q_x) and our main artist, Santiago Iborra, for having dedicated countless hours and expertise into making the project great - without you guys we'd be nowhere.

Many more have dropped by, some encouraging us, others asking questions or sharing great ideas. We are delighted with the renewed efforts, energy, new people joining and the new traction on our development forum.

Thus, we were at a point where it made perfect sense to evaluate the current progress, goals and intentions of WTactics in order to map out the future. As a result of that evaluation we have come to some joint decisions about the coming development of the game and the overall project.

Summed up:

1) There will not be an official WTactics CCG ruleset chosen or promoted on WTactics.org as originally intended. That will instead be replaced by something better...

2) The rulesets ARC & ORC will continue to be developed as two different games, each with it's own devs. We see this as healthy and raising quality in the long run.

3) WTactics.org will be gradually transformed from a project about creating one card game into a co-operations platform and resource node for all things being open source card games and board games, where developers can meet, share and promote their libre projects.

4) The actual games that the ARC/ORC rulesets lead to will have their own product sites, with their own domains and game names, maintained by their devs. None of these games will use WTactics or any form of it as it's game name. Preliminary names for these games are ArcMage/Gaia. The games link to and promote each other and WTactics.

5) Primary function of the game product sites will be to show off their game and distribute it to the end user/player. Not development, that they'll redirect to WTactics instead.

6) Resource sharing will continue between ARC & ORC via WTactics infrastructure as usual and whenever possible. This includes new artworks, but also documents, rules, mechanics and cards et.c. to whatever extent is productive or in other ways that the devs agree on.

We hope this makes as much sense to all of you as it did to us. We honestly believe that this is good for creativity, caters to different development processes and dev. decisions, as well as leading to overall improved quality by healthy competition and co-work. As developers we have mostly similar ideas, but some of them are different enough on crucial matters that makes it more empowering for all of us to pursue on various paths of discovery instead of compromising and sticking blindly to a single one.

While not there yet, we are confident that we are closer to our goals now than we have ever been before, and that we will eventually get there. We have interesting times ahead of us, and we're thrilled to have you all aboard.


with regards,
Stefan & Nico

Re: [announcement] Future of WTactics

Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2016 22:54
by ngoeminne
Thumbs up!

Nico

Re: [announcement] Future of WTactics

Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 21:19
by Desttinghim
A concrete plan. Conserve resources in development to accelerate the growth of new card and board games within the creative commons. The separate sites and names should help to lower confusion, while allowing multiple play styles with common elements.

I quite like it.