A while back I blogged about a new game project announcement – namely Protoshell by Moocat. Now I rarely blog about new games, but this one caught my interest on several levels to make me do so. When I am looking for interesting game projects I generally take the lazy man approach. I look for 5 key elements, or just tag the project and move on until a release materialises (if ever):

- An interesting concept
- Documentation, documentation, documentation
- An awareness that the World is not composed of “Me” (the Community factor)
- At least the rudiments of a web presence
- No signs of panic or confusion at the thought of developing an app

Protoshell hit all five in a matter of two days. Since that very very rarely happens I joined the forums, and over a week later I revisited the forum to pay more attention. I’m happy to report that Moocat is well up the curve when it comes to organising a project. The forums have a set of about 10 mini braindump posts covering a wide range of topics, and planned game features. The forum is still up, and the website page was recently re-designed and looks very clean cut.

Importantly those mini braindumps cover a whole range of ideas, most only touched on in brief. Concise but not lacking in thought. There is a huge selection of ideas in these that will warrant some deep discussion in the future – that’s not a bad thing, it’s a damn good thing. They read like a discussion brief.

There appears to be no Sourceforge registration as yet, but that’s not ultra important at such an early stage until a plan of action appears, and inviting in new developers won’t dillute the effort as can happen until you find committed members willing to stick with the project.

Anyways, the long and short of the story is that I find the project both interesting and full of potential. I feel I can make a solid contribution to its future, and so I have applied to be a developer. I’m hoping my past experience in building RPG game features will be of use – I spent a lot of time a while back implementing RPG style inventory, attribute and skills in Shadows Rising.

Indirectly I suspect working on Protoshell will also be applicable when I get around to building Shadows Rising again using the Partholan framework – SR is more high fantasy then cyberpunk so the cross pollination of ideas and concepts isn’t damaging to the success of either. I just love it when different projects come together into a cohesive whole where efforts are more capable of being shared among differing projects – it’s a valuable synergy.

Related posts:

  1. Protoshell
  2. Protoshell goes live (the website/forum at least)
  3. More planning…:)
  4. Up next: PHP Game Framework v0.10
  5. blogBB and Test-Driven-Development