Adonthell is a FREE RPG under GPLv2 or later license.
The game itself is currently very simple and have a nice 2d graphics and simple gameplay.
Adonthell 0.3 aka “Waste’s Edge” is a short demo game that was meant to show what the game engine is capable of.
With Adonthell 0.4 which is still in active development a lot of things have changed and added.
The game itself wasn’t exciting to me (at least not version 0.3) , but the development tools (of 0.4) are priceless.
Adonthell 0.4 is not yet available as a package and needs to be compiled from source – but for the tools it has, compiling is surely worth it.
As the title said, Adonthell is not just a game, Adonthell is a game engine and also a collection of tools which makes the game, like :
* Charedit for creating characters and creatures
* Dlgedit for creating conversations between player and NPCs
* Mapedit for creating the game world
* Questedit for creating the quest tree
* Itemedit for creating items
Those tools are still bound to the game engine and currently could only be used at Adonthell BUT without too much work they could be converted as “stand alone” and even used in other game project.
All those tools are bound to each other and integrated BUT also could be used separately – quests and inventory aren’t a must for game creation while map and characters are.
But they could be integrated with each other as tools, meaning that you could put a script in Dlgedit that would add things to the inventory and even update your quests when a specific dialog option is chosen by the player.
As you might know I am slowly developing a draft for a text game which if ever be done I will release under GPLv3, more on my little project I might write later.
So for my project I chose the Dlgedit tool for dialog trees, and it’s remarkable.
Dlgedit lets you easily create a visual dialog trees and add python scripts to them, the Adonthell developers even wrote a guide on how can Dlgedit be used – which is very impressive.
On that note their wiki is fairly detailed and holds much information for the developers
As I’ve mentioned Adonthell 0.4 and it’s tools needed to be compiled from source, it wasn’t easy at all – but the developers were extremely helpful and guided me step-by-step what I needed to do.
They also updated their wiki with new dependencies we discovered on the way and also fixed the code so it would actually compile on my machine.
I’m sure that now it is much easier to compile Adonthell with it’s tools.
My hopes is that other free game projects will use Adonthell’s tools and convert them to be used with their projects or even as “stand alone”.
I think they are very useful and in Dlgedit’s cease very unique – I didn’t see such a tool anywhere in the FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) world.
There were in fact such talks at PARPG forums (which is a FREE cRPG in development) but it’s still undecided.
This time I will not include screenshots for this game as version 0.3 doesn’t represent the current status of the development and my attention was not on the game, but on the tools – tools other developers can use for their projects.
You see, people seems to judge from first sigh, and the screenshot from version 0.4 (yes, only one screenshot – and not a good one) could harm people’s opinion about the game while the tools are good and useful in other projects.
Links
Adonthell Project Page
Adonthell Wiki
Dlgedit
Adonthell IRC channel could be found at #Adonthell at the Freenodes server, the developers are usually there and they are very helpful.