We set out to see how an open source and super extensible voxel game inspired by Minecraft could go beyond it and offer gameplay like seen in Dwarf Fortress or Dungeon Keeper. What would modders come up with if you could create and ship a mod with a few simple commands, making it available immediately for download in-game by others, in a secure sandboxed environment?
Our engine is intended to be as bare-bone as possible, even excluding such basics as inventory, health, creatures, or combat. A series of minimal modules are meant to be bundled with the game's standard distribution to offer a sort of vanilla game experience, with a focus on commonly used systems that are often fragmented and re-implemented many times over. All such modules are community owned and maintained, guaranteed to work with every release.
Any content is wrapped in modules ranging from tiny frameworks supporting commonly needed utility to large gameplay templates commonly referred to as mod packs in the Minecraft world, that in turn can depend on dozens of the smaller pieces, maximizing reusability.
Creating a new module is as easy as running a single gradlew command, having a community repository created on GitHub is another single request away, and fetching source for any such community module is yet another single command. Dependency resolution is supported within the engine framework both for development and for runtime usage, including auto-downloading from a running game server to connecting clients.
- Twitter: The keys to successful proposals are: creativity, professionalism and effort.
We want to be inspired by your proposal and we appreciate that you put reasonable effort in it and generate a reasonably professional output.
We expect a proposal that is about 3 pages long.
The description of the project should make the bulk of the proposal and it should go in some detail. You are free to propose an entirely original project or to pick ideas from our GSOC page:
https://github.com/MovingBlocks/Terasology/wiki/GSOC
The proposal should also include rough weekly goals and broader milestone goals coinciding with the three evaluation phases. We expect inline documentation and javadocs throughout the project, but please notice that wrapping things up and adding "the final touches" at the end of the project takes time.
Finally, the proposal should include details about your experience/interests in relation to the GSOC project, but we'd prefer if you didn't include details such as photos, gender, age and other personal details that have no relevance to the project. Full resumes are also not useful.
Expect to stay in daily contact with the project during the work period. Such high visibility helps before too.
For some further ideas you can search the web for past GSOC proposals and/or check out the following two blog posts from one of our mentors: