Techne, Aviation & Airrace slash community-funded game development

Billiards, a Techne game

Techne is a simple real-time physics engine.

Aviation

Aviation is a simple flight sim framework.

 Airrace

And then there's Airrace.

Airrace is a proof-of-concept Application written on top of Aviation implementing an air race game where the player has to pilot a light-weight aircraft through a track consisting of pylons or air gates. Although its written as a test of Aviation and in order to promote its development, it's still a full-fledged game. Currently there are 7 training courses and 5 race-tracks but adding more is a piece of cake.

We seem to be talking much about funding lately on this blog.. Well here's another one: the developer of all these wrote "an idea about a community-funded game development project but as this probably sounds like a cheap scheme to profit out of free software please consider reading the full text for the rationale behind it."

The author speaks of open source games and their origins, of game production methods and the dilemma of game dev versus engine dev (milk vs. cow).

I think I should quote the (quite long) core message:

I'm therefore proposing the following: I'm starting a fund-raising campaign with the purpose of allowing me to work on this project full-time. The original idea was to quit my job if enough funds could be raised to sustain me for a certain period of time, say a year although the game should take far less that that time to become playable. Still the devil is in the details which include documentation, thorough debugging and different game modes and these take time as well. Anyway I'm currently unemployed now so the plan can be simplified. If enough funds can be raised I'll continue working for as much time as possible on the game full-time. The goal will be networked gameplay and various modes such as duels, dogfights and bomber escort missions. I'm very open to suggestions of course, these are just some preliminary thoughts. If funding goes better than expected everything apart from the minimum I need for myself will be directed towards hiring other people fore side tasks. This may include artists and web-developers for the game GUI and pages. If funding fails I'll just create the core technology as I've done until now and move on to the next project. This is the only alternative if Techne is to be developed further. I just hope temporal restrictions will allow at least that.

I like the idea. But it lacks a progress bar. A.. donation widget.. wait, let me run Inkscape..

A donation widget idea (source)