My Wesnoth Experiences: Part 1

A while back I was contacted by a Wesnoth user known as BfWEnthographer, who told he he was conducting “research on users participation in Battle for Wesnoth”. He asked me if I’d be willing to help him out by answering a few questions, to which I responded in the affirmative. I thought it might be of interest to whoever reads this blog (if anyone does?) to see the questions he asked and my relies. I will release these interviews in several blog posts, since there are far too many to cram just into one post. In this post I will respond to the first two questions he asked me.

QUESTION1 – Playing
After a very brief introduction about yourself and your background (profession, age, country…whatever you like)
an you tell me a little bit about your relationship with the game (as a player)? (For instance: How and when did you first start playing Wesnoth? What do you like the most/least? Have you always played regularly? …)

I’m a home-schooled high-school student from the eastern USA. I’m interested in graphic design and technology, love turn-based strategy games and role-playing games, and I am something of an Apple fanboy. I got my first computer (an HP Slimline Pavilion running Windows Vista) back in 2007, and instantly became interested in the world of computing. Computer games were a natural interest for me, and with that interest developed an interest in computer graphics. In 2008 my HP died, and I switched over to the Macintosh computers and OS. Since the majority of the games I’d played on Windows did not work on Mac OS X, I started looking for new, Mac-compatible games to replace the ones I could no longer play. At some point in my search, I discovered Wesnoth 0.8 on an out-dated gaming site that I no longer remember the name of. Since I have a satellite internet connection (as well as the data cap and slow download times that come with that kind of connection), I was instantly drawn to the small download size of the game, and (of course!) the fact that it was free. I downloaded it, and was instantly sucked into simple mechanics and gameplay that led to a wealth of strategies and replay value.

I played 0.8 for over five months before thinking that perhaps there might be an update available that would make the game even better, and I began to investigate the game online. Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that not only was an official website for the game, but that there was also a large and stable community behind the game, and that the current stable version was 1.6! I quickly realized that I’d been playing an obsolete version of the game for nearly six months, and wasted no time in downloading 1.6 and enjoying all the vast improvements that had taken place since 0.8. I waited for some time before actually joining the community, but it was inevitable that I would join it eventually, and I did so in late December 2009.

Today I am still in awe of not only how Wesnoth manages to produce such fun and at times complex gameplay and strategies using very simple mechanics and rules, but also how moddable Wesnoth is and how sophisticated the engine has become. To be honest, I really find it hard to say anything negative about Wesnoth, simply because there is very little negative about the game, in my experience. Perhaps my biggest gripe is that the engine isn’t as RPG-friendly as I’d like, but since Wesnoth is a TBS game that was never intended to support hard-core RPG gameplay, that gripe is rather ridiculous.

I’ve played Wesnoth pretty regularly up until about October 2010, when my academic workload began to increase significantly. I’ve always played mainly single-player campaigns rather than multiplayer games, since my unstable internet connection doesn’t allow for enjoyable multiplayer matches. These days I still find time to actually play Wesnoth from time to time, but right now most of my Wesnoth time goes into creating art or mods for the game. I’m not so active on the Wesnoth forums anymore due to (of course) lots of schoolwork and my shaky internet connection, but I hang out with the Wesnoth community on Twitter fairly frequently, and I read the forums (usually as a guest) whenever I get the chance.

QUESTION2 – Contributing/Participating
Why did you start contributing (what did motivate you)?
How did you start (own project, collaborating with others, providing feedback, testing…)?
In what activities are you currently involved (only art contributions or more)?

I joined the community for the sole purpose of being able to contribute in some way to the game. I almost instantly decided I wanted to learn how to create unit graphics, and I began to learn how to create pixel-art. It was an uphill battle, but I’ve been at it pretty consistently since December 2009, and I’m proud to be able to say that, with the help of such notable Wesnoth artists as thespaceinvader and Zerovirus, I’ve become fairly decent at creating Wesnoth unit sprites.

My motivation for contributing originally came from a desire to be able to create my own art for my Wesnoth mods, but eventually my principal motivation became the blue name of an art contributor. I wasn’t interested in the blue name simply because of the respect it afforded from the community, however; it was more about a personal goal for me, to see whether or not I could develop my skills enough to become an art contributor.

To date, I have never contributed a single baseframe to the mainline game; all my contributions to date have been in the form of animations. This is rather ludicrous now that I look back on it, because creating animations is usually considered much harder than creating baseframes. In fact, it was through my struggle to learn how to create baseframes that I learned how to animate, and now it is my opinion that my animating skills are far above my baseframe-creating abilities.

I’ve been involved in quite a number of Wesnoth projects in one way or another, either as a player giving feedback, an artist contributing unit graphics, a code contributor, or a developer. Right now I’m developing a single-player campaign called ‘Undead in the Sewers!’, which experiments with the role-playing possibilities of the Wesnoth engine. It’s pretty much a sole-developer effort, as I have never been good at meshing my ideas with someone else’s, although I have enjoyed a fair amount of player feedback that has vastly helped me to improve the campaign.

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