About the game
GunFu Deadlands is a Far West themed 2D action shooter featuring bullet time á la Max Payne and the Matrix movies. It started as a small project with the goal of being fun and simple to play, yet challenging. The game currently features 10 levels, very simple graphics I drew myself using Paint.NET, and is completely written in Lua, using the Löve2D game library. The sound effects were obtained from Freesound.org and post-processed with Audacity. The music was written using Milky Tracker.
Licenses
The code is licensed under GPLv3. This means you can download it, modify it as you wish, share it with your friends or with anyone you want to, sell copies of it or whatever you want. The only condition is that you must also provide copies of your version of the code if you decide to show it to anyone. If you keep your copies or modifications to yourself, then it's not necessary that you show your code to the world, but every single user of either the original or modifications should be able to get the source if she wanted to.
The graphics and the music are licensed under Creative Commons By. Which means you can copy them, use them for whatever you wish to do, make modifications, remixes, fan art, and even sell them, for example printed in T-shirts and mugs. The only condition is that you tell the world that I (the author) created the originals.
The sound FX are licensed under Creative Commons Sampling Plus. This means you can copy them, remix them, resample them, and use them, provided you attribute them to the original authors (which are listed in a "readme" file I have put in the source code tree). The only problem is that this license does not give you permission to use them commercially. I am worried by this, since this prevents copies of the game to be sold, or even to be offered as a free download in websites with ads. In the future I would like to record my own samples or get another set of them with a different license, so I can offer the whole game as a pack for anyone who is interested in spreading it. Sorry about that, at least it's in my to-do list.
About the project
I started this project immediately after the BIGjam, which was an encounter of indie games developers that took place in Berlin. It was my first contact with the Indie games scene aside of lurking in forums and blogs. The experience was very inspiring to me, so I took the decision of starting a small project that hopefully I would be able to finish in a reasonable time. My first estimation was that GunFu Deadlands would take between one and two weeks to be finished. It actually took the whole month of August of 2009, and by now in the beginning of September it is starting to ressemble a finished game. There is still a couple of details to polish, but hopefully I will be able to present it to society soon.
My goal with this game is just to challenge myself in being able to finish such a project, it's my first game and I will be happy if it is played and enjoyed by as many people as possible. I have learned quite a bit from the experience and would like to code more games in the future, always aiming to small projects that can be finished in a reasonable time.
My profile is that of a coder. I have put a lot of effort to have the AI right and the coding in general. Unfortunately my skills as a graphic artist are way more limited, and the same can be said about my musical capabilities. As of today, I have been fortunate enough to find a friend who has offered to write some music for this game. In the future, I would like to start collaborations with graphic artists and musicians, and hope that this first game of mine is a good presentation card.
I am not really interested in starting a professional career as indie games developer right now. I have a dayjob that pays my bills and would like to keep games development as a hobby for my free time. With that in mind, I am releasing the game as GPL, with the explicit goal to reach as many players as possible.
About me
My name is Christiaan Janssen. I am a dutchman raised in Barcelona. I currently live in Berlin after having spent some time travelling around. Professionaly I work as software developer, although my education is as Telecommunications Engineer. It's somewhat related. Even though I have always had interest in videogames from the point of view of a developer, I never actually made the step to start writing any, aside from small pet projects that never got finished. After attending the BIGjam I got the necessary inspiration and energy to start this project on my own. At work I program in C/C++. In my spare time I have a growing interest in scripting languages, specially for rapid prototyping and game development. I have been playing around with Python (PyGame), Lua (Löve2D), and would like to learn ActionScript for making games that can be deployed in online form.
Feedback
Any kind of feedback is appreciated. Please use the project's discussion forums to contact me or share your thoughts with the community. If you like the game, just drop a line. This kind of little details are very encouraging. If you would like to collaborate more actively, you are welcome! Just let me know through the forum. All kinds of collaboration are welcome: Improvement of the graphics (although maintaining the style), patches for the code, fan art, tales of awesome killings of bandits, new music, new sound FX, suggestions for improvements, etc. If you are interested in the source code you can download it via SVN or just browse it in the sourceforge project's website. I just would like to warn that in the current moment the code is quite hacky and ugly and needs a lot of cleanup, something I will do if suddenly people are starting to be interested in seeing it.
Greetings
Download
Christiaan Janssen "ChrisJan", September 2009.