OpenNullanoid is changing forever.

[Kabir404]

21'st September, 2023

Here us refers to OpenNullanoid while any first person sentences refers to Kabir A. K. Zaman

Hello Everyone

After quite a stressful night I'm going to be announcing that OpenNullanoid is going to pretty much change forever.

As life isn't as easy as we hoped to be as children and therefore can't have the all the nice things that we wished to.

In order to create an proper community of contributors and developers we must either have the financial support or the community reach and support, both of which we do not have unfortunately.

Let's address the elephant in the room first: OpenNullanoid isn't going anywhere and I hope these changes would mean that it would become a sustainable development group in the long run.

Therefore, OpenNullanoid has to change as a part of my realization of many things in life. As I'm going to be real, I'm putting myself first instead of the people now because If I can't support myself, how am I supposed to support the community then?

Remember, Canonical was able to successfully able to ship great FOSS software because the CEO of Canonical himself was someone who was financial capable of building an FOSS empire from financial investments.

While as for KDE, they had the community support from the beginning because at the time the goals for KDE were new and noble and was able to spread well to the newly brewing Linux Community.

So changes has to be made. Otherwise, OpenNullanoid and even myself would collapse into obscurity.

The changes

Here are the list of positive and negative and potentially even controversial changes which would take place on OpenNullanoid. Please read them properly and if there's any miscommunication or misunderstanding then please let me know.

Game Projects

This section applies to to the game projects itself. Meaning the source tree and the specific assets for the project as well as release binaries(.EXE, .APK, .ELF etc.) for the project.

I'm taking an similar approach to Epic Games in terms of publicity of source files and underlying projects.

• Negetive Changes
  • Game projects are no longer will be able to be completely FOSS.
  • Game projects would become private under the OpenNullanoid GitHub Organization and the FOSS Licencing schemes would be removed/replaced.
  • Game projects would either have advertisements or will become paid software.
  • Some of the design specifications for the Game Projects would need to be patented in the future to prevent unauthorized duplication.
• Positive Changes
  • Game projects would still be accessible and contributable if you become a member of the OpenNullanoid Github Organization.
  • Game projects would be able to get proper funding under critical circumstances in order to maintain sustainability.
  • Advertisements are going to be shown fairly and paid software will be charged fairly as well.
  • Third-party assets and tools would still be credited accordingly with an new in-house spec.
  • It would completely disallow any form of unauthorized project copying.

Game Frameworks and Tools

This section applies to the tools and frameworks that are used to develop the Game Projects.

• Positive Changes
  • Non game-project-specific code and frameworks would be available as free and open source software.
  • The toolset used to develop these projects would still be mostly free and open source software.

Community

This section applies to the community around the OpenNullanoid and as well as the things about the game projects we would share. rektifiedfire-docs-core is an prime example where we would share information about the game project codenamed rektifiedfire itself to the community.

• Negative Changes
  • We won't be sharing the exact details on how the game should be developed under the public projects.
• Positive Changes
  • The files containing the information about the main plot/story and relevant files would be under Creative Commons licences.
  • We're open to fan made remixes of our own stories and other creative content.
  • We will be supportive about creative content in general and would provide tools and advices for the community.

The state of the current projects

We currently have 2 active projects underway: RektifiedFire(Depth Walker: Veangence) and "Cube"(The Cube Project). And we would keep these projects alive but some things have to go by the change.

The changes for RektifiedFire

• The source tree for RektifiedFire will be deleted and will be rebuilt as a private project with the GNU GPL Licensing and REUSE-Compliance removed.
• RektifiedFire, if made well, would cost 5~10$ on steam and on mobile platforms we will figure out an way to fairly show ads.
• RektifiedFire will still be on Godot 4 as well as the toolchain remaining the same.
• RektifiedFire will use our own In-House licencing and crediting specification to accordingly credit developers and artists. This is an replacement to the REUSE spec as It's not friendly for game development use.
• RektifiedFire's docs would be restructured and story and the relevant information would be under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

and as for The Cube Project, It source tree has not been published yet but It would also contain similar changes to RektifiedFire.

The Future

I'm sincerely sorry for the controversial changes, as to make the foundation of the OpenNullanoid stronger, we had nothing else left to do. It's hard to get volunteers or investors to help us work on the projects.

But as I have the vision to create great quality games without going into greedy malpractices for income and development, the games would not contain DRM(Digital Rights Management) and would ask the community for fair use of adverts in mobile games.

And if we get enough funding then we might be able to create high quality FOSS games for everyone to enjoy, just like how I imagined in the beginning.

I - Kabir A. K. Zaman would work full time as a Lead Director and Developer of OpenNullanoid and we're still open to contributions.

There is also a possibility that in the future we may create an backing organization(OpenNullanoid Technologies KX) to accelerate the development of new gaming technologies and ideas.

Sincerly,
Kabir Akeemuzzaman

Founder, Lead Director, Developer, Writer

OpenNullanoid