I want to make money from DROD.
Wait! It’s not as bad as it sounds! Just hold on a sec.
· Caravel DROD will remain free and open source. Even if I didn\'t want it to be, the Mozilla Public License, under which DROD is licensed, and my obligations to the other project contributors pretty much dictate this.
· I plan to continue releasing free versions of Caravel DROD with more monsters, more rooms, more everything.
· There will *not* be a \"
premium\"
version of Caravel DROD. Caravel DROD will not be crippled, not have annoying wait screens, not contain ads, and not have anything about it that indicates that it is less than the best version of DROD to be had.
· We will release holds (level collections) for Caravel DROD as commercial products. These holds won\'t be archives of levels created by the user community. They will be a set of quality puzzles designed as a whole, created solely by the Caravel team and not available elsewhere. The story of DROD will continue in the Caravel holds. New characters and plot developments will provide extra incentives for you to delve deeper into the game.
The next release of Caravel DROD (free) will have the level editor and several other features. It\'s an easy prediction that DROD players are going to turn into DROD authors, and build up a slew of new holds to play. So you won\'t need to wait for the Caravel team to feed you challenging puzzles. Man, I can\'t wait to see what you guys come up with! Except for Lucas\' levels, I never had a chance to play anything made by other people.
After that, we\'ll start working on a hold called \"
DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold\"
. We plan to release the hold simultaneously with a new version of Caravel DROD that comes with a smaller hold to get your feet wet. So you can download Caravel DROD (free) and play through the introductory levels (free). At that point, you\'d likely be looking for more levels to play. You could either find new levels from the user community (free), or you could pay something like $20 for \"
DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold\"
and get right into the thick of it. And of course, you could do both.
This is a good thing for DROD players, because more features will be put into the game. With the commercial hold release, Mike Rimer and I will be asking, “do you want us to keep writing games?” If a lot of people say “yes” by spending some greckles, then we have much more freedom to improve this great little game. So we’ll offer you something good and see if you want it!
Also we’ve got some other Caravel games planned, though it’s too early to go into details. Mike Rimer and another sturdy fellow, Butch Istook, are putting together a puzzle-solving RPG, and I think anybody that likes DROD will go for this one too.
The downside of these maneuvers is that we can’t expect the same style of collaboration in the development of DROD. I’ve been very lucky in the help I’ve received from programmers, feature authors, and other contributors. I simply can’t ask for or expect the same type of volunteerism when things go commercial.
Some time after the level editor is released, we may begin publishing source code with each release, instead of making it available during development. This is to prevent people from making an early release of DROD that would undermine sales of holds. Note that this process would not prevent people from using our source code to make their own versions of DROD, and we would be following the requirements of our open source agreement.
The development process will be a lot different. If you’re a coder that wants to write some improvements into DROD, the first thing is you’d have to be open-minded about other folks making money on it. The second thing is that you wouldn’t have access to the latest source code. I think those two things are going to greatly dampen people’s desire to jump in as contributors, but if we get some indie developers, I would like to help them out so it isn’t that bad. This help would include:
· Answering questions on writing code, building the project, and general architecture.
· Making source code patches available that will reduce merging problems that the independent developer might have on subsequent releases of Caravel DROD.
If an independent developer is particularly talented, we might talk to him about opportunities to work on a Caravel project for royalties. No promises there, but it is certainly possible, especially if we get good sales for our products.
Then there are the feature requests. Because Caravel is potentially making money from other people’s ideas, we need to handle this differently. Much as I’ve appreciated all the ideas that have been sent in by people, I’m no longer going to solicit for them. If you’d like to see something in the game, make a post on the forums, understand that we can’t pay you for the idea, and possibly we might pick it up and use it. If you feel you should be compensated for your ideas, I recommend that you don’t share them publicly. If we want to use any ideas that are in our feature request database now, we’ll contact the authors and ask how they feel about it.
So I hope nobody is angry, alienated, depressed, or confused over these changes. If you are, why don’t you post something on the forum? We can definitely talk about it. There is a lot in store for you, and I think this is the best way to get the goods delivered!
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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