Google Summer of Code 2011
Say hello and be welcomed to our introduction page for the Google Summer of Code 2011 (GSoC).
If you do not know what GSoC is you may want to visit the project's homepage. But if you do so you probably want to know more about OpenClonk.
About OpenClonk
In short, OpenClonk is a successor to the Clonk gaming series. Clonk is a game based on quick and hectic hand to hand combat, large-scale base vs. base battles, underground mining and/or friendly settlement conquests. There is no flow of the game like when you play a big campaign to advance the story nor is there a secluded game content which reliably reappears in every level you start to play. Every scenario (i.e. level) in Clonk is a story of itself, it lasts from a few minutes up to a couple of hours to finish (or fail). One scenario may bring you to a watery cave and the next one up in the sky to solitary floating island where falling is your end. The great advantage of Clonk is the easy way to modify it and create your very scenario or a new set of ingame objects. Past Clonk titles have seen medieval castles, the Wild West, a fantasy setting with powerful magic and scary dragons or futuristic laser battles. To sum it up, Clonk is everything you make out of it. This is because Clonk has an own powerful script language called C4Script (documentation on this site) in which the game content is written.
You want to know more? See the About page and the homepage (www.clonk.de) of the commercial predecessors of OpenClonk.
Why participate to GSoC?
OpenClonk possesses a team of motivated developers yet not enough to take on every task required. Though there is a running release of OpenClonk (see Download) it resembles hardly the concept and idea of the finished game. We hope to gain new members of our developing community and get some long needed tasks done. And of course we want the existence of Clonk to become widespread known because we all think that is was, it is and will become a good and fun-to-play game. We may not be as big as other OpenSource organisations nor are our tasks for applying students as numerous. Yet most of the team looks back on years of experience in developing and designing a game and wants to share this with upcoming developers. We would gladly provide our assistance to 1 or 2 students willing to support our project.
Preceeding participations in GSoC
OpenClonk did not participate in GSoC before. The project started in the middle of 2009 and now looks back on one and a half year of development. In 2010 there was not enough progress done to support applying students.
What about licensing?
OpenClonk uses the ISC license for code and Creative Commons (CC-by) for any other content (graphics, sound, ...). See License
Tasks for applying students
The game (engine) is written in C++, the seperated easy-to-modify content is written in Clonk's own C-alike scripting language C4Script.
See our GSoC2011Ideas page for a list of tasks.
Motivating students to stay with the project
Clonk is game. So it is devoted to everyone who likes playing games! OpenClonk is free to play, the predecessors are freeware except for the newest, Clonk Rage which is free to test. Applying students should test out the game before applying to see whether or not they like it. Then they are introduced to a friendly community of developers some of them knowing each other for years and thus became friends. We wants students who hopefully will like Clonk as we do.
Contact and communication
The development is organised in the Forum as well as in the #openclonk-dev IRC channel (located in the euIRC).
Administrators to watch GSoC
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Our mentors
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