AncientBeast and FreezingMoon

Now, on the opposite side of the adver-spectrum, I present AncientBeast, a Norse-mythology inspired multiplayer strategy game with roleplaying elements that has been in development for quite a while.

It has a huge web presence, with a Facebook group, Twitter  account (hiss use identi.ca), Miro video group (nice!), DeviantArt group with tonnes of awesome art... We'll have to see what license they fall under in the end, the team are still pondering how they'll make an open game that can sponsor a couple of beers for the devs.

See those circles? They show progress of the individual
aspects of unit development

Their development methodology is rather interesting as well, from the use of a shared Dropbox account to collaborate and share art, to the rather excellent Bestiary system they've developed to introduce players to the different units in the game, their stats and abilities, and show the development progress of the indicated unit. That's some AAA level stuff there guys.

One of many timelapses and tutorials

Another remarkable thing about their development process is how well documented their art production is... They have loads of timelapses and tutorials of the team's artists creating concepts and models, I can almost confidently state that it's the biggest repository of its kind in open gaming.

One thing to keep in mind though is that coding wise they've only broken the ice. They've started implementing the game using the Blender Game Engine, but in the 2 years since the original designs were written up the most awesome art has been produced and the programming side of things have stayed relatively silent until recently; something not many other FOSS games can attest to. So if you know Python/BGE, this would be a very good time to jump in and help out.

Speaking of ice, the AncientBeast's development team, FreezingMoon has a bunch of Blender 2.5 and other FOSS asset creation tool tutorials on their site, and are looking for more submissions. It would be awesome if they could collaborate with OGA on that, in my uneducated opinion :)

If this post has interested you, be sure to drop in on their IRC channel, they have both a webchat page and a tutorial to get a desktop IRC client running