About FlexWorld
FlexWorld (Flexible World) is a game about playing in dynamic and interesting worlds. It has been in development for about 10 months now.
I think the best way of describing FlexWorld is to talk about the 4 facts of the tagline: "Play, Discover, Create, Develop"
Play
The first thing someone wants to do when getting a new game is - of course! - playing it. FlexWorld will come with a gamemode called Factions:
Your character joins the game as a young human in the wild. To survive you learn basic things like obtaining food, building a secure shelter and learning skills (mining, fishing, fighting, cooking etc.). You will also meet Luna, a friendly squirrel that answers your questions and gives you some basic tasks.
As your character's abilities advance, you will begin to explore the world. Luna already told you about three factions that live somewhere. So you visit each of them and depending on your personal likings you do tasks for them. Unfortunately the three factions are at enmity, so when you do something for one faction, the other two won't be happy about it.
However being successful in one faction also means your ranking will increase and sooner or later your goal will be gaining as much power as possible. Of course that also counts for the other factions, so the stronger you get, the stronger the others will get.
Playing takes place at one planet in the beginning. If you're successful, your faction will be the only one left, but the universe doesn't only consist of one planet, and another nation that you even haven't thought of is also interested in getting back its land...
So, does this sounds like an interesting singleplayer game? Wrong! FlexWorld is some kind of hybrid: It can always be turned into a multiplayer experience. Imagine you're just fighting for a faction and one of your friends comes online to support you - or defend his faction.
Technically FlexWorld does always run a server in the background. When starting a game (or loading a previous one), you can decide if others are allowed to join. Just make sure your computer is reachable from the internet.
Discover
FlexWorld doesn't force you to follow the "storyline". You can always stop your tasks and explore the world. Maybe there's something you haven't discovered yet? Like special flowers or animals. Maybe some items can even be combined with others to create new stuff?
The Factions gamemode will already include a lot of things that can be discovered, but FlexWorld won't stop here; please read on!
Create
While playing Factions, I highly bet you will also create interesting things, like buildings, farms, cities etc. Especially when playing with friends it's something that's quite fun.
However Factions isn't everything in FlexWorld, instead it's only one possible way of playing it. You can create complete new worlds, including planets, characters, items and even functionality.
So you just want a world where people can meet and chat? No problem, build it, remove all the Factions stuff and open the server for the public.
Want to bring it to an even higher level? Then you're probably a developer, and this is something where FlexWorld's biggest benefit kicks in:
Develop
As a developer (programmer, graphics artist, sound artist) you can use FlexWorld to create worlds completely from scratch. This includes graphics, sounds, music and scripts.
FlexWorld uses the Lua scripting language to provide logics - in all aspects. So with some little effort you can create new gamemodes or modify Factions.
FlexWorld has been designed to support custom assets from the beginning (as it is my personal goal: having a product that's not tied to one area). Let's do a little example: You always had that nice idea of a roleplay game. So you create a new world, create graphics and sounds (or use the ones from Factions) and provide the logics through Lua scripts. You feel it's fun and you decide it's quite more fun when others join your world. Just open your session for the public and your friends can enjoy your world together with you.
You can also launch a 24/7 dedicated server. It's as simple as starting a new game on your local computer.
Features
Here's an incomplete list of features FlexWorld will include:
- Built-in gamemode Factions.
- OpenGL 3D graphics engine capable of modifying the whole world.
- Designed to be extended: Add/change graphics, sounds, music and scripts.
- Lua scripting language for creating own logics.
- Single- and multiplayer (hybrid).
- Multi-platform: Programmed in modern and standard C++ to ensure it runs at least on the big three (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).
- Auto-update/-download of assets when joining other servers having assets that you don't have (via a resource hashing system).
- No DRM, no restrictions: What you create is yours.
Status
FlexWorld has been in development for more than 10 months. Core features like the client, server, much of the 3D engine, resource management, scripting and much more are already done and are currently in a refactoring process to harden the source code.
However it's still too early to provide releases or demos. A lot of features are still being worked on. For example the Factions gamemode hasn't been started yet due to the development of the scripting engine and missing assets.
What we need & what you get
We're programmers, that means we're really bad at the creative things like graphics, 3D models etc. These things need to be bought from professional artists.
Also we'd like to program the project in full-time to fasten the development and being able to fully concentrate on it.
Of course there're tons of other things that need to be paid, like a website (+ server), legal stuff (trademark, taxes, sales, ...).
So every buck you invest into this project will greatly help its development in all areas. Keep in mind the campaign doesn't has to reach its goal. Every contribution helps!
Of course we're not only asking for your help but also want to give something back (besides the game itself). Checkout the perks for some special features.
Besides the perks we'd also like to offer you a special feature: Everyone who raises this campaign will get access to the (time-limited) pre-alpha release. It will be the first release ever made for the public, and you'll be able to try it out - for free!!
Contributions for those with a small wallet
We understand that a lot of people can't afford giving away money for something that hasn't even been completed. Therefore you can do other things if you like what we're doing.
Spread the word! Tell others of this project, blog/tweet about it, give us your ideas and suggestions. Do you like what you read? What didn't you like? Everything is helpful for us, so don't hesitate to drop your line.
And who knows, maybe we have something for you guys, too... ;-)
