Truly, truly the Elvish folk say,
"Magick flows from the earth."
Leave both wall and city behind,
Take to the wilderland, there magick find.
Travel the wild lands a year and a day,

Eat of the berry-bush, root, leaf and flower,
And give ye thanks as bow is drawn.
Sing each evening of the coming dawn,
And each morning to our Lady Mother -
Her bosom our pillow, her tresses our bower.
-- Andrew Phillips


And so Marcella must take her leave from Erinsford and travel to the remote area of Dun Barethsol, to uncover her past and shape her future.

However, so far her destination exists mostly in our imagination and so we are searching for artistic talent to truly bring it to life. If you are able help, please read on.


The Project

Adonthell is a RPG engine in development since 2000, currently heading towards the 4th (and hopefully final) incarnation. It's aim is to combine classic western story driven RPGs like Ultima VII or Planescape: Torment with the look and feel of classic eastern RPGs such as Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger.

We are currently in the process of porting our previous demo game, Waste's Edge to the current version of the engine, thus paving the way for our first true RPG. Dun Barethsol will bring back locations and characters from Waste's Edge and continue some of its plots, but will be much larger in scope.

The Team

Adonthell is an open source project entirely developed by volunteers in their spare time. As such the team structure changes from time to time but at present consists of the following active members:

Andrew Phillips -- Writing
Frederico Cerveira -- Programming
Ingo Ruhnke -- Guest Artist
Joseph Toscano -- Music
Josh Glover -- Programming
Kai Sterker -- A bit of everything
Tyler Nielson -- Programming

The Talent needed

We are looking for 2D artists to design the various locations of Dun Barethsol and create the graphics that go with them. The style we are aiming for is hand-drawn and "natural", mostly friendly and colorful, and we'd be more than happy if the visuals had a certain unique touch to them.

Even more we're in need of creature sprites and animations for our characters.

Please note that we can only accept art and graphics that are licensed under GPL2+ and/or CC-by-sa.

The Engine

The Adonthell engine is written in C++ and uses Python for scripting. It is highly portable and so far runs on GNU/Linux, OSX and Windows. It is still not feature complete, but nearing a state where the creation of Dun Barethsol becomes feasible. Internally, it uses a simple 3D representation of the world for tasks like collision detection and positioning objects. On the outside, rendering and graphics are purely 2D, with no further processing of images. Every pixel is drawn exactly as intended by the artist.



A preview of the latest engine is available for GNU/Linux, OSX and Windows (but beware the programmer art!).

The Tools

Together with the engine, a set of tools is being developed, to make working on the game as comfortable as possible. Like the engine, the tools can be used on GNU/Linux, OSX and Windows. Ready to use so far are

• Modeller. Turn simple graphics and sprites into objects that can be placed in the game world.

• Mapedit. Construct the game world and augment it with meta data.

• Dlgedit. Write the kind of dialogues that are characteristic for story driven RPGs.

The Resources

Practically all aspects of the project are documented on our Development Wiki. Some select links for prospective artists:

• Graphic Artist's Tasks -- what needs to be done ...

• Designer's Reference -- ... and how to do it.

• Plot Design Guidelines -- the basics of a story driven RPG ...

• Dun Barethsol Plot -- ... and what we made of it *spoilers*

The Contacts

Preferred ways of communication are the Adonthell Mailing Lists (which require a subscription) and the IRC channel #adonthell at irc.freenode.net. For initial contact, you can also send me an E-Mail at kai-dot-sterker-at-gmail-dot-com.



Edited by ksterker - 19 June 2010 at 11:47am