Autumn's Realm: About the Game

Want to know more about the game? Here's the place!

Autumn's Realm is a role-playing game for your mobile phone. It is developed cooperative by free software developers across the Internet. More information about the game can be found in the sections below.

• The Story
• History
• The License
• Principles

The Story

Autumn's Realm is the story of a world facing a crisis. The peaceful little town of Ilridge is built on river trade. It's a relatively secluded place, mainly keeping to itself. However, when the river trade business dries up due to a famine that results from mysterious rotting of food, the town starts to look outward for help. A stranger arrives in town, obviously a budding adventurer, and the town begs for aid. Agreeing to do what he can, the stranger sets off to investigate the famine, and its strange connection to the mysterious Black Sorceror...

History

Autumn's Realm was initially developed by Chris Smith in the summer of 2005. It was then quickly forgotten. In late summer of 2006, it was released as an open source software project in order to harness the creativity of a variety of voices game design, graphic design, etc.

That's where we are now. You can help contribute to the history by getting involved and doing noteworthy things!

The License

Autumn's Realm is distributed under the BSD license. The full license is included below:

Copyright (c) 2006, various authors
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.  Redistributions
in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of
conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or
other materials provided with the distribution.

Neither the name of the product nor the names of its contributors may
be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
without specific prior written permission. 

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS
IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED
TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT
OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE
OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
				

If you aren't familiar with the BSD license, it is less scary than it may at first appear. It allows you to do most things with the code. For example, you may use Autumn's Realm as sample code to help write your own code. You may send Autumn's Realm to anyone you want. You may send your modified copies. You may copy code from Autumn's Realm into any other project. You may even sell Autumn's Realm to others, for any price you desire (although if you charge too much, you may find that people prefer to download it for free instead). You may extend Autumn's Realm with your own code and sell the resulting commercial application.

Although we can't give legal advice, we feel that the following are excluded by the license: suing any contributor for any reason relating to your use of the code; distributing code without the original copyright notice or a copy of the BSD license; or representing your derived software (if you make significant modifications) as being the same thing as the original or supported by the developers of the original. In addition, if you make major changes to the plot, story, or content (especially including anything that does not conform to our content guidelines, such as sexually explicit content), please don't call the result "Autumn's Realm". Doing so may or may not be legal, but it's certainly not polite.

Principles

Autumn's Realm follows a general set of principles regarding its interpretation of the fantasy genre, and the approach of the game to a variety of topics. This is all informal, and may change over time due to mailing list discussions.

• As a general rule, we prefer interpretations from mythology or ancient sources over the modern fantasy genre. For example, elves are assumed to be three feet tall with pointy hats, pointy ears, and a mischievous grin. Exceptions may be made when necessary for the story line.
• Intricate settings are encouraged, but they must be tempered by a concern for a lighter style of game play. The game is not an exercise in memorizing lots of information.
• It should never (repeat NEVER) be necessary for a player to take copious notes in order to play the game. Remember that the game is played on a mobile phone, and might be played on a bus or while standing in line at the DMV.
• We avoid copying ideas from other sources, even if it doesn't violate copyrights. There are no different "colors" of dragons, for example.
• There is a certain terseness of style that is considered desirable. It's difficult to define this principle very precisely; it is just a sense of what works in the game. To give an example, anyone familiar with the DragonWarrior series knows that the series adds monsters left and right just to have a lot of monsters. We avoid that. The twenty major monster types defined in Documentation/monsters.txt in the source tree are all that we feel a need for. There are inevitably variations: for example, with nymphs, there are ordinary Nymphs, Cave Nymphs, Nymph Guards, and a Nymph Queen. However, these variations are driven by the plot, and not by any value assigned to having more kinds of monsters.
• We strictly enforce content guidelines. The game is not to contain any profanity, excessive violence (including blood or gore in images or text), drugs, or sexual content. Nudity is allowed in the visual appearance of some monsters of the "fae" category (nymphs, pixies, sprites, and dryads) where it is traditional, but only if done in a modest and appropriate way. Other content that might be objectionable is discouraged as well. We want everyone to be okay with their kids playing this game.