First, let me say that I'm in no way looking to degrade or otherwise impune the WME with my question:
Is the WME stable enough and capable enough to run an "industrial strength" game? We're talking literally hundreds of scenes, potentially thousands of scripts, music and all the other support programming it will take.
Here's a bit of background:
I've put together a crew of four of my friends that have an interest in adventure games. We're all in our 40's, professional programmers, graphics artists, amateur music composers, with regular jobs, etc. We all started playing the text adventure style games like Zork in the 80's, then went on to Sierra's games, etc. We're not into ego-shooters and the current crop of "kill or be killed" 3D games. We enjoy solving puzzles using our grey matter over blasting others to virtual smithereens.
We also want to commercially publish a game in the adventure genre... (It's just something we've all wanted to do...) Between us, we've published other graphics works and are confident that we could get our game into the market. We considered using Inform (
http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html) and using static graphics, but it wasn't quite what we wanted.
We have a great storyline (really!) and could produce enough graphics, puzzles and game play to easily go 10+ hours or more...
Between us, we could probably code an engine, but that's not what we want to do. We thought of using the JME in Java (
http://jmonkeyengine.com/index.php) or Irrlicht (
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/) but nixed the idea. (We write code all day long for our employers, we want to exercise our artistic side!)
We're quite taken with the WME and in looking at its features and capabilities would like to consider it as the "engine of choice" for our game project. We wish to use the newer 3D actor enviroment that is incorporated in WME 1.6.1. We're also planning to use Blender for our rigging and scene creation enviroment (we want to use freely available, non-commercial tools). That would mean some custom Python programming which we would be happy to share with the WME community. We're also considering using the newLisp library (
http://www.newlisp.org) via external dll for extending the game login beyond the WME scripting language (if the newLisp license allows) and the GIMP will be our graphics creation application... We're considering our audio composition tools...
As the project is intended to be primarily FUN and a relaxation, we're in no hurry but would put a 12 to 18 month window on completion just to keep things moving along. If we're successful, we'll consider publishing our work and techniques (hence the Open Source or "free" tool chain) to encourage others to try their hand at adventure game authoring.
Any comments would be welcome. Thanks.
