What is it that you do exactly for Unknown Horizons and how/when did you get involved?
I’m project coordinator and programmer at Unknown Horizons. I got involved with Unknown Horizons about 3 years ago, when it was still named OpenAnno. At that time the project was pretty much at a standstill. The team had just restarted with the new engine FIFE that we still use today. I joined the team when there were about 90 commits in the repository and started to code from scratch. You can read a pretty detailed report of that and the history of UH in general here
The reason i got involved in the first place is that I love Anno 1602. I wanted to make an open source game and then this project along perfectly.
When I first saw Unknown Horizons it reminded me of the game Anno. Was this the source of inpiration?
Yes, absolutely. Anno is one of the best game series ever made in my opinion and serves as a great source of inspiration for our work. I’ve “wasted” countless hours of my youth playing Anno and don’t regret any minute of it.
Playing the game is very fun till the point where the evolution stops. So what is the model of development for Unknown Horizons? Are you doing things one by one, in the same way the player will meet them in-game?
Yes, we are adding new buildings as we go along. The biggest problem here is finding graphics for the new buildings that we want to include in the game. Other features are mostly built in as needed or as some programmer is in the mood to program them.
What is left to be done and how long before you finish Unknown Horizons?
A lot is left to do. We need to add all remaining levels of our settlers. This again is mainly a graphics problem, but will also need a lot of balancing after being implemented. We also want to make multiplayer more fun by making the AI work in multiplayer mode. We’d also like to add a singleplayer campaign to make playing alone more interesting. How long this will take is impossible to say and as with all open source projects: you hardly ever “finish” them. There is always a bug left to fix.
Developing a game that uses a very immature and still in heavy development game engine (FIFE) sounds risky. Is it problematic in any way, or is it good for the game since you help on the development of the engine and adjust it to your needs maybe?
It has both pros and cons. On the negative side we have to deal with bugs in the engine, but on the positive side we have a great connection to the FIFE developers and can have bugs quickly. It’s also fairly easy for us to have features, which we need, added to the engine. We’ve participated at google summer of code together with FIFE and we really think it’s a very collaborative effort.
Unknown Horizons is a project-advertisment for FIFE. Are we seeing the full potential of this engine on your game?
Yes I think so. We are using most of the features provided by FIFE and we really push some of them to their limits, like the number of visible tiles on one map.
FIFE has invested a lot of work into making this faster in the past half year, with great success.
Unknown Horizons got publicity although it is still very immature. What do you think made your game so popular, so soon?
It’s probably its similarity to the Anno series. Everyone loves Anno and the fact that we are creating an open-source game which you can play for free appeals greatly to many people. There are not a lot of big open source strategy game projects out there, so the demand is fairly high for new games.
And even though our game is in a fairly alpha stage of development, it’s clearly possible to get a few hours of fun out of it, making it perfect for a Sunday afternoon of relaxed gaming.
What is the most difficult part of making a city-building 2D game?
We’ve invested a lot of time into tuning our user interface to make it easy and intuitive to use. This has proven to be a very difficult task and it takes a lot of work to design a truly great interface. I think our result is pretty good so far, but there is still a lot left to be done.
Another difficult part is balancing the different production times and settler consumption. You can invest basically an unlimited amount of time into balancing. This is especially problematic as the balancing changes with every new building that is added to the game.
Finding the line between too much and not enough micro management is also quite difficult. Often times its not easy to decide whether something should be automated or manually done by the player. For a recent example see this forum post on the problem of auto-adding trees around the lumberjack.
Your forums are full of ideas, suggestions and bug reports so I see you already developed an active community. Tell us about the community contributions, and the way someone can help you in developing the game.
Everyone can contribute to our project. We need help with programming, graphics, game-design, community building, publicity management, writing scenarios and campaigns. A good starting point is here
Contributing to an open source project is a great way of giving something back to the open source community and most of all: a lot of fun. So if someone wants to help out, the best way is by joining our IRC channel for a chat.
If you are short on time but still want to help us, you can always leave a donation.
Is there anything you would like to say to our readers?
I’d like to thank everybody for the nice comments we’ve received and am very happy to see so much interest in our little project. Please join our IRC channel for a nice chat about Unknown Horizons or anything else any time! If you want to stay up to date on our development, follow us on facebook, twitter: (@uhorizons, @nihathrael), google+ and join our beta mailing lists to be notified of development releases.
