About

Skycastle is an open source project that aims to create a fairly generic game engine for online multiplayer games, in particular in the roleplaying genre.

Player Creativity
Skycastle differs from most existing games in that it focuses on enabling player creativity in the game, by allowing the players to construct things from buildings and corporations to mini-games and robots.

Modifiable, Simulated Game World
Skycastle aims to support a procedurally generated game world, from forests and streams to towns and cultures. It also simulates the game environment, changing it permanently in response to player actions, allowing things like digging canals or building hills, or extinction or importing of different species.

Co-operative Editing
Game creators should be able to quickly set up their own game, by mixing and matching content created and shared by other game creators. Also players will be able to share and modify blueprints for created content, rate it, and discuss it with the authors and other users in-game.

Strategy
We are developing Skycastle in Java, using existing libraries to implement as much as possible of the low level work (network, persistency, 3D scenegraph). We will try to make the core simple and flexible, and add different features on top of it in separate modules, that can be developed in parallel by different developers. We will try to make it easy for both game creators and players to create and share content, and thus minimize the content creation burden for the core development team.

We will not be implementing character levels, instead going for a more realistic skill based world. This will avoid the need for a lot of different content for different levels, eliminate artificial social isolation of the player base by level, and remove a lot of balancing issues.

Values
Skycastle is about creating, sharing, and experiencing together with others (both when creating and playing the game). Thus, our core values could be:


 * Enabling Creativity
 * Sharing Ideas
 * Immersive User Experience
 * Cooperative Interaction