PARPG searching for a lead writer!

M

mvBarracuda

Vault Dweller
Team name:
PARPG development team

Project name:
PARPG - Post-Apocalyptic RolePlaying Game

Brief description:
The project has been originally founded in early 2009 and has been in production ever since. The game is heavily inspired by gems of the golden age of Western isometric singleplayer 2d RPGs such the Fallout series (especially Fallout 1 & 2), Arcanum and Planescape: Torment. While we released a first techdemo of the project in March 2010, I had to step down from my position as project manager to focus on my studies. Unfortunately the project slowly fell apart back then as I was not able to attract a new project manager to take over where I left. Now I'm at least partially back in action and want to try to get the project back on tracks with the help of ... YOU :-)

The game is set in an alternative future post nuclear Scandinavia. Can you stop the nuclear winter that threatens to turn the Earth into a giant snowball or is the fate of our world sealed?

Target aim:
Open source and free of charge

Compensation:
As the project has no commercial ambition, the only reward we can offer is the satisfying feeling to work on a project in the spirit of the golden age of isometric 2d RRPG classics. So this is mainly for people who would either like to have a portfolio project under their belt or simply love these old school RPGs and would like to work on such a game themselves.

Supported platforms:
Windows, Linux, Mac

Talent needed:
Lead writer
In a nutshell: our writing efforts never took off in a consistent and structured way. When the project started, we've agreed upon some basic setting guidelines and wanted to leave the rest to the to be found writers. Unfortunately that process didn't work out well in reality. Interested writers in the past mostly focused on fleshing out NPCs or proposed potential storylines for the game. At the same time, no writer was really willing to commit to fleshing out setting elements and what kind of writing themes would be worth exploring in the game. So now we've got loads of writing ideas (TM) sitting in the wiki but there is almost no consistency to them. Therefore we have decided to tackle the problem from a slighty different angle than in the past.

We're looking for a lead writer who would be willing to commit to the more substantial parts of the writing process. We're looking for somebody who is not afraid from making decisions in the fields of setting, themes to explore and storyline of the game. Obviously somebody who is familiar with the post-apocalypse genre would be strongly prefered.

For a more information about the lead writer position, check out this advert: http://wiki.parpg.net/Finding_a_lead_writer

Website:
As mentioned above: the entire infrastructure for such a project is already in place. We're hosting our own blog, wiki and forums while our SVN and Trac repositories are hosted by codesion.com. Furthermore public releases of the project are offered at sourceforge.net:
* Blog
* Forums
* SVN
* Trac
* Wiki

Contact:
The best way to get in contact with me is to visit the IRC channel of the project: #parpg at irc.freenode.net (freenode network). In case you don't have access to an IRC client right now you can also simply join the channel via your web browser: join #parpg IRC channel in your browser

If you prefer email communication for first contact, you can email me as well at Martin DOT Vohland AT googlemail DOT com. Our IRC channel is pretty much the established way of communicating with the other developers so interested writers do hopefully have no IRC aversion :-)

Previous Work by Team:
I've been working as project manager of the FIFE project from mid 2005 to mid 2008. FIFE is the isometric 2d engine that we're utilizing for PARPG. We shipped eight public releases of the engine in this timeframe and I was pretty much responsible for the same tasks that I listed above, including recruitment of new developers. Furthermore I've been maintaining the FIFE win32 devkit, a collection of tools and libraries to easily and painlessly build the FIFE engine from source on Windows systems.

Additional Info:
Here are a couple of screenshots from our March 2010 techdemo release:




And here's even a fancy video :-) nothing beats moving pictures:
PARPG techdemo 1 video at youtube (switching to 720p quality recommended)

Other project-related art (concept art, portraits, renders, etc. click on the thumbnails for fullscreen versions!):








Raider_270.gif


Raider_fallback.gif






Feedback:
ANY

We appreciate all kinds of feedback. If you want to tell us something, even if you're not interested to get involved, shoot right away :-) We can take it.
 
I appreciate what you've done for the Fallout community and I love your guides Per, but that was a pretty stupid remark, wasn't it?

You know, there are actually games being made with FIFE these days:
http://www.unknown-horizons.org/

EDIT: I should have thought of a funnier reply. How about this?

Per said:
FIFE is coming out next Thursday, right?
Click to expand...
Yep, new release date is Thursday. We originally planned to ship at Wednesday until we've found out that you plan to release the XHTML 1.0 STRICT version of your guides at Wednesday.

As we couldn't compete with such a massive newsworthy release, we decided to push back the release one day.
 
I'd be interested in helping, but I'm uncertain if I have the skills for any of the positions being offered (you know how it is). Any way for interested people ineligible for the "big" positions to help out in smaller ways?
 
Yes, I could fulfill the time commitment, and it would be fun to help out. I'm just not certain if I'm good enough. You know?
 
Download yourself some self-confidence, Little Robot! Then, you'll be a Great Robot. Slightly Not As Little Robot?
 
It does sound interesting, it would require some major investigation (at least geographical) about the country it is set in, I am completely ignorant about Srilanka, but I am gonna read the wiki, and see If I can come up with something.
 
verevoof said:
Download yourself some self-confidence, Little Robot! Then, you'll be a Great Robot. Slightly Not As Little Robot?
Click to expand...

But the driver update is not compatible with many of my primary tasks! Namely being a coward.
 
Little Robot said:
I'd be interested in helping, but I'm uncertain if I have the skills for any of the positions being offered (you know how it is). Any way for interested people ineligible for the "big" positions to help out in smaller ways?
Click to expand...
Right now we're trying to find a lead writer. We used to approach the writing situation a bit different in the past, but that didn't really work out.

So we'll be looking for "assitant/contributing writers" down the line who'll flesh out smaller details after the to be found lead writer has set a framework for setting, themes and story. But it doesn't make much sense to produce more writing content before we have some agreed upon (meta) guidelines (in terms of setting & themes to explore). Because most writing content will be heavily based on these guidelines.

generalissimofurioso said:
Five hours a week eh?

Hmm...

Color me intrigued, which I assume is an odd shade of purple.
Click to expand...
The truth is: it will be hard to get much done in 5 hours per week. Most lead developers invest 20 hours plus a week into the project but we can't expect such a massive commitment from any new contributor. So our evil plan is to say that it will only take 5 hours per week and get them interested this way.

Once they're interested they'll love the project and will get sucked into it. And sacrifice their lifes on the project as we do :-) At least that's the theory, not sure how well it will work out in reality.

Just joking ...

5 hours per week is really an optimistic guess, but if you can actually invest at least 5 hours every week (and you're a talented writer with good communication skills), color us interested :-)

Walpknut said:
It does sound interesting, it would require some major investigation (at least geographical) about the country it is set in, I am completely ignorant about Srilanka, but I am gonna read the wiki, and see If I can come up with something.
Click to expand...
I guess that was meant as a joke? Scandinavia, do you speak it?
 
I'd talk to DutchGhost about it. The man has some good authoring under his belt, and something like this may be up his alley. I'm just throwing his name out there,no clue if he'd be interested or not.

Also, color me interested for a little bit of freelance ideawork, if you need somebody to bounce ideas off, or whatever. I also do sketches of non-organic objects sometimes, if you ever get the need for a rough draft of an assault rifle that isn't an AK or something.
 
Reconite said:
Per said:
FIFE is coming out next Thursday, right?
Click to expand...
Along with Age of Decadence of course. :lol:
Click to expand...
Shocking news: FIFE is already out!
http://fifengine.net/2010/12/06/0-3-2r2-released/

Nology5890 said:
I'd talk to DutchGhost about it. The man has some good authoring under his belt, and something like this may be up his alley. I'm just throwing his name out there,no clue if he'd be interested or not.
Click to expand...
EDIT: Misinterpreted your statement. Thanks for the pointer, I'll send him a PM.

Nology5890 said:
Also, color me interested for a little bit of freelance ideawork, if you need somebody to bounce ideas off, or whatever. I also do sketches of non-organic objects sometimes, if you ever get the need for a rough draft of an assault rifle that isn't an AK or something.
Click to expand...
Pictures or it didn't happen :-)

Concerning tossing around ideas: one of the main problems with writers in the past has been that contributors were mainly interested in tossing around ideas. They couldn't commit to the work in a more substantial way. Everyone had their own great ideas (TM) but nobody was actually willing to sit down, read what the others have already written, provide feedback, critize, flesh out in more detail etc.

So we're mainly looking for contributors who're willing to commit to the project in a substantial way.

But color us interested in your sketches, if you can provide any pictures of previous work, that is :-)
 
Hey mvBarracuda, I'm going to look for some of my sketches to scan in tonight. I'll have them to you by the morning.
 
Quite surprisingly for us, we had quite some interest in the open lead writer position. Our initial guess was that interest would be rather low, so we were not really well prepared for this situation.

I'll sit down with the other lead developers this week and we'll figure out a process how interested writers could present their writing concepts to us in a somewhat consistent and representative way. We think about using one of our setting articles at the wiki as starting point, and letting interested writers flesh out a number of themes (prolly around 3) that they would like to explore, based on that setting article.

But this is nothing that is set in stone at this point. If things go as planned, we should have fleshed out some kind of starting task for interested writer around Friday or Saturday. I'll post a link to the starting task in here as soon as we have figured out the details :-)

P.S.: If we go down that route, we'll prolly use that setting article as starting point for the task: http://wiki.parpg.net/Setting
 
I won't appy for the position (have too much to do for myself ) but I want to wish you all good luck again barracuda. This is a very promising project and it's nice to see that it makes progress!
 
Alright, I sent the sketches in a PM, because I'm really critical of them. Again, they're rough, but I can shoot them out really quickly.

Now that I've seen the setting document, I could do stuff like pipe rifles and blunderbusses, maybe a crossbow or two.
 
As you might remember: we were looking for a lead writer for PARPG recently. Quite surprisingly for us, not just one but a couple of writers were interested in filling this role on the team. We considered to use a formal application process to handle this but after quite some discussion on the team we realized that giving writers a formal task to work on might not work out that well in reality due a couple of reasons.

A formal work sample will tell us nothing about the communication skills of a writer. Furthermore a work sample doesn't really give us any idea how well (s)he can adopt established workflows or if (s)he's interested in actually helping out with defining these writing workflows/guidelines.

Therefore we decided to invite every interested writer to spend the next four weeks with us working on the game. Writers will brainstorm with the other developers. We will develope a creative vision for the writing department together. You have the chance to contribute with your creativity by fleshing out new writing content (as proposals) or reviewing existing content and revising it with the other developers.

If you're interested in contributing to the project as writer, please check this article at the wiki where all the details of the process are covered: Writer application process
 
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