About

OpenClonk is a project dedicated to the further development of the Clonk game series. Our goal is to improve and make the real strengths of Clonk more fun to play: Bustling mining, production lines and economy, fast and fiddly melees. Another focus lies on the further enchancement of the game engine and the extensibility/modability of the game content with C4Script which has always been one of the most important features of Clonk.

How did it start?

In early march 2009, Matthes Bender told the other developers of Clonk Rage that he wouldn't have any time to work on Clonk anymore. As the Lead Designer of Clonk since Clonk 1 and Directing Manager of RedWolf Design, the company selling the Clonk titles, he left a significant vacancy. The development of Clonk Rage, the last commercial Clonk title, was mostly done as a hobby by the other developers and although they wanted to continue doing that, they felt that more contributors were needed. RedWolf Design agreed to put the game engine's source code under an open source license, the ISC license. The source code was published in a public repository, allowing everyone to freely modify the source code and game content and discuss the future directions in an open forum. It was also decided to drop a lot of the "old" game content and drop the backwards compatibility requirement.