Apricot is the title of an open source game currently being developed by the Amsterdam-based Blender Institute. While Blender is perhaps best known in the open source world for its cross-platform 3D content creation suite of the same name, it is fast developing a presence in the multimedia entertainment industry too. In 2005/06 it launched Elephant’s Dream, “the world’s first open movie”, a short film made entirely from open source software and released with open production files. Riding on the success of this creative enterprise, Blender went on to make Big Buck Bunny, another open source animation film that recently premiered at the Amsterdam Film Academy. The characters from Big Buck Bunny will feature in the Apricot open source game.
The Apricot project was launched in February 2008 with a core team of six members covering all areas of design, artwork, development, scripting and level editing. It is a cross-platform 3D game and like its cinematic cousins, it’s built on open source software. The team use”Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together”. The fundamental aims of the project are to work in connection with the online community to deliever a piece of software that not only offers a compelling 3D game experience, but aims to “improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions”.
Curious to find out how Apricot was coming along and to hear some of the rationale behind creating an open source game, I put the following questions to the Apricot team and here’s what they said:
OSLiving: Video games are part of a billion dollar global market, dominated by the top four multinational giants (Sony, Sega, Nintendo, Microsoft). Each of these corporations has the ability to pour extensive funds into game research, development, and crucially into global marketing campaigns. Where does a game like Apricot fit into this 21st century corporate market and why did you opt for the Open Source model?
Ton: I think you answer the question yourself…even though the ‘giants’ deliver extremely high quality products, the accessibility of their systems for developers or students is very limited. Not to mention that they don’t allow independent content distribution at all. Our Open Source and Open Content model addresses this problem, to fill a gap that’s maybe commercially not very interesting, but relevant for millions of people; access to quality tools and software to be able to make free distributable 3D gaming content.
OSLiving: What have been the biggest obstacles you’ve had to overcome in the development process so far?
Darek: In the typical development process the worst thing what you can do is to start developing tools and engines. Many teams kill ther own projects doing this, because after two years of developing they put all their energy into building an editor for example, and nothing else is done. But in our case it’s different. Why? Because developing tools is one of the main purposes of this project and that’s very exciting! Imagine how cool it is when every missing feature in Blender [3D content creation suite] or the 3d engine is implemented at your request! Hah 
So on one side it’s great to work like this but - yes, of course it’s also the biggest obstacle for me as a games designer because everything is always in “pre-alpha-2.5.1.23″ stage, unstable and with missing features. But by the time we’ve finished you’ll be getting the most powerful open-source game developing environment!
OSLiving: Back in December 2007 in the run up to the project launch, the topic of character animation in the Apricot game was met with a degree of criticism in the OSLiving forums. One forum member pointed out that Blender had not appointed an animator as part of its development team. Four months into the project, what is the state of animation and how have you compensated for this absent role?
VenomGFX: In this kind of project where there are only 6 people in the team, and in this case, only 2 artists, you have to multi-task. You can learn how to model, texture, light, and do some compositing too in a fairly short amount of time, but animation is an extremely complex topic that requires years of experience - which I don’t have. I know the basics of animation and have read a couple of books, but what I do know well is when my work is not at its best (or in other words, it sucks).
Animation is a new topic for me, and I’m new to this project, but with the help of the Peach (the movie project) team and some serious criticism from myself and others here, i think we’re getting somewhere, if not then we won’t be devoting this amount of time to making a second unit like our brother project did.
There are a few tests for cycles posted on our blog already, not enough, and I’m not even totally happy with them, but it’s what we need to test the new Crystal Space Animation engine for, as soon as we have something else finished and tested, we will post it, so stay tuned!
OSLiving: Could you talk us through some of the highlights of the Apricot game?
Chris: The premise of the game is based on and is a kind of sequel to Project Peach’s animated short movie Big Buck Bunny. The player explores the world as Frankie, a devious little squirrel out for revenge that gets a kick out of bullying all of the animals that cross his path. The characters in the environment will be highly interactive, and react in different ways to being bullied. Character interaction and fun, fluid animation will play huge roles in this game. For gameplay, they’re our main targets.
OSLiving: What does the future hold in terms of Open Source games?
Ton: I really don’t do this with a long term vision…the short term is crucial: to validate and improve an open source based game creation pipeline. After that a lot of scenarios are possible…who knows, perhaps the ‘giants’ will open up one of their platforms one day. Imagine Sony making PSP open source!
If you’d like to find out more about the Apricot game, you can visit the Blender team’s development blog. The game is scheduled for a 6 month development period and we’ll keep you updated as and when a launch date is announced. Many thanks to the Apricot team, including the producer, Margreet Riphagen, who helped get this interview together.
Comments 4 comments | Leave a comment »
May 5th, 2008, 6:07 am | #
This is the first I’ve heard of Apricot and all in all it looks like a pretty solid game project. So first of all thanks for posting this article.
One thing that strikes me in this interview and from reading snippets of the Apricot developer blog, is that the team has put a lot of emphasis on the peripheral ‘tool kit’ that’s being developed in parallel to the game.
Don’t get me wrong, that in itself is a great thing and will be of huge benefit to the game developer community. I do feel there’s a ‘but’ in that there’s a degree of self-defeatism in this approach; sort of like “If all else fails, at least we’ll have some cool developer tools to fall back on”. In other words the focus is not 100% on making a kick ass game and I suspect this is what sets it a part from the ‘giants’ that you speak of in your opening question.
The open source game has a different agenda. The capitalist imperative, i.e. the pursuit of inifiite wealth, has been removed from the equation, so the development focus has to shift to something else. It becomes a ‘didactic’ process, teaching, learning and developing software that pushes the boundaries of knowledge. This is a noble cause, but is this development model apt in terms of delivering a kick ass game? Because after all, that’s all the end user is interested in isn’t it?
May 5th, 2008, 11:55 am | #
Jonathan, great comment and some interesting points.
I suppose as outsiders to the development process, it’s difficult to gauge just how different the open source model is. And to make matters worse, I don’t think we can even talk of a ‘model’ at all given that most of this is being devised by teams like Blender as we speak.
As to whether the game will be a success or not, we’ll really just have to wait and see.