Introducing a New Open Source CRPG System
What is the Broken Staff CRPG System?
It is an open source computer role playing game system designed by Broken Staff Studios for a number of projects we are working on.
It was mainly influenced by the following games and rpg systems:
- Wizardry 6/7/8
- Might & Magic 4-6
- Gold Box AD&D
- Baldur’s Gate / Icewind Dale series
- Dungeons and Dragons v3.5
- Darklands
- Master of Magic
- Daggerfall/Morrowind
- Quest for Glory 1/2
- Mount and Blade: Warband.
- Grimoire Super Demo
Of course we’ve added our own spin on those classics and are trying to create a brand new system that allows for:
- Fun games created from it
- A large range of characters and parties with lots of room for customization
- A system that will offer lots of replay value for any games that use it
- An easy to mod system so even non-programmers can make fairly substantial modifications
What Open Source License Are We Using?
We are planning to release the Broken Staff open source crpg system under the General Attribution License. It seems to be the best license for this application. You can read more about it here: http://copyfree.org/standard/licenses (General Attribution License.)
The license effects all the XML files, any C# example code and any included PDF files – the XML is for storing the data and the PDFs are for explaining how the data is used.
What does the license mean in short? You can use this system for anything you want even commercial applications, as long as you include an attribution to Broken Staff Studios.
We think this is an open and fair way to handle usage of the system by third parties, you can make money off of it (more power to you!) and save in development time as long as you give us a shout out for the thousands of hours that we have put into development.
How to Monitor Our Progress?
For news and updates about this system remember to check this site semi-regularly.
We plan on releasing the system to the public for feedback in stages. We are currently in the early or alpha stages of the system, most of the work done has been on XML files to store the system data. Since this is a labour of love we are using an iterative, create – test – fix approach, probably not anything that would win awards for outstanding software design but it is getting the job done.
Once the data has been defined we will release an initial alpha v0.2 of the data. After that the next release v0.3 should include a simple C# system browser program to make viewing the data easier and hopefully get us more feedback.
Stay tuned for more information.