New game project

["Pedro Medeiros" <linux@linkexpress.com.br>]

Hi! This is my first message in this mailing list. English is not my first
language, so if I make mistakes or if I am not enough clear, please, be
patient. :)

I decided to write as soon as I got something worth writing about. :) My
group is gathering with the purpose of creating a game with the look and
feel of the classic japanese RPG games (conventional 2D RP games like...
Namco's _Tales of Phantasia_ saga), and the advantage of being first written
in English and Portuguese (and then in any language as people come to help
us :)). I don't need to say that our effort will join the increasing number
of games released under GPL. The plot will be also based on japanese science
fiction/culture/ concepts (We used to play a lot of japanese games in old
computers and videogames, such as MSX, PC- Engine/Turbographix, SNES, even
understanding so little of them. :)).

The graphics designing of the project is already arranged. Concerning the
sound structure part, I was considering a different sound format: something
light on memory and cpu usage that looks good on every soundcard. Adopting a
light module format, or even THX, a sound format used in Amiga computers,
works better. THX is quite simple and small because it doesn't work with
patches of instruments: everything is synthetized. And its simple
architecture would allow the music composer to focus in the basic structure
of the music (I hope this makes sense :)). Obviously, that's for bgm. We
still need digitized sounds such as wav or au sound files for battle scenes.
Somehow we will wrap those things together. ;)

This game will take a while to evolve, for not a single piece of code has
been implemented yet. We are not experienced programmers and we don't know
how to optimize code for games yet. Our major problem is the set of libs and
SDKs we could use. Libggi lacks the sprite handling support, although it's
the most promissing environment.  Svgalib and X11 are both quite unfriendly,
and it may not be a good idea to get messed up with them right from the
start. SDL and Clanlib have those security issues too.

We will try to get something playable by the middle of vacation in Brazil
(probably july). I'm not trying to create vaporware here, but I would like
to share whatever we learn, the good and the bad things, what we choose to
use and receive some advice as well. :)

Thanks.