Blaugust 8/31: Weekend Wesnoth

Well, we're a week into the festival of blogging wonderfulness that is Blaugust, and I have to say that I've been really impressed by the quality of stuff that's been being produced each day, by both groups of Blaugustinians, the internet ones as well as our little club of A-town lunatics. Keep it up, guys.

For those of you that are starting to flag a little under the strain of producing regular content, may I recommend this little list of prompts started by Belghast, every time I revisit it there's some new ideas that I wouldn't mind trying, but then I remember my schedule and figure that if the people are expecting devastatingly difficult quizzes about Italian history, and that it would be rude to disappoint them in favour of something that people might actually want to read.

According to the schedule, today is the day for me to post another Wesnoth vide. A couple of weeks ago, about the same time that I took my annual pilgrimage back to Silvium, the Wesnoth development team put out this cry for help, looking for more programmers to help them speed up a development cycle that has slowed to basically nothing. There's been an amazing response of interested people that has probably given the game a bit of a shot in the arm, but it got me thinking about the way that games die.

Wesnoth is twelve years old. It dates back to the days of Morrowind, Tactics Ogre and Medieval Total War, but it's still being developed, and still being played. You can't play Medieval Total War on windows 8 for love nor money any more, but Wesnoth is still ticking along. I'm not sure what I'd do without Wesnoth, which has been a stand-by for me for a long time, the only evergreen game that I can always go back to. Whenever I've been looking or something to play, I've always been able to head over to wesnoth.org, download a new version, and find all sorts of new and interesting things that people have created using this generic fantasy game as their toolkit..And if I want to, I can help them do it, despite my lack of useful skills, because Wesnoth is so easy to mod, all you need is a text-editor. This community of creative people have been building this game that they love together for so long, and come up with so much excellent stuff, that there's always something new to discover and enjoy.

If she ever does finally die, it will be a sad day, but I know that I'll never forget what is was to be part of this team of creators dedicated to the open-source movement and doing it for the love of it, instead of for material gain. I hope that day is a long way off, though, and until then, I'm going to keep contributing however I can, which today appears to involve recording movies of me being terrible at the game.

Keep it classy, people, talk to you tomorrow.