Yep, It's Done.

"Failure counts as done" -- The Done Manifesto

It's been a few years since I checked this site, and I notice the top news story still implies the project has some hope. Sorry, no. It's done. We did what we did.

Some cool stuff happened as a result of this project. Some of the ideas and three of the core team (Terry Hancock, Rosalyn Hunter, and Daniel Fu) are involved in a new (and very much alive) project called "Lunatics" ( http://lunatics.tv ), which creating an animated web series about space advocacy and space settlement set on the Moon (all under a CC By-SA 3.0 "Attribution-ShareAlike" free license).

Light Princess ultimately failed for a lack of strong interest in the technical, coding part of the job -- the project founders were not focused on this part of it, but on the creative/artistic aspects. That was mostly an intentional choice of the project. We were responding to the idea (common in 2000) that artists could simply not be persuaded to release under free-licenses such as those used for free-software.

I think that Light Princess did successfully demonstrate that this was not true -- it was just a matter of seeking out the artists rather than waiting for them to show up in programming forums (which would generally be a long wait!).

I have no idea how influential this project was on the general thinking of the free-culture movement, but I do know that just a couple of years after that (2002), the Creative Commons was founded, specifically to support artists wanting to release under a free-license (we subsequently converted as much of the Light Princess content to CC By-SA as we could, although by that time we were not in contact with all of the artists any more -- therefore some of the art is stil under th "Design Science License" that we started out with, though the effect is much the same as By-SA). And free-culture has really boomed since 2000.

The new project, "Lunatics", is pretty much purely about the artistic work. We're using Blender, Inkscape, Gimp, and other free-software authoring tools, many of which were not even available under a free-license when we started "Light Princess".

So, in terms of learning and demonstating the possibilities of free culture, I feel that "Light Princess" was a success. Unfortunately, it was not a success at making a graphic adventure game.

I have seen a small re-birth of the graphic adventure genre on Kickstarter, which is an encouraging sign, even if the new games are just as proprietary as the old ones. At least some of them will run on GNU/Linux platforms, since so much more is being done with virtual machines nowadays.

I guess you never really completely lose your attachment to projects like this. I will always probably have a little twinge of regret over being unable to finish it. But we were a long way from that goal, and I'm much more excited about our new work on "Lunatics".

On that project, we've got the audio for a pilot episode, and (later this Spring) we will be crowd-funding to support workflow development, 3D modeling, and animation of the first one (and hopefully two or more) episode(s). If that's exciting to you, come check it out and maybe help us with it ( http://lunatics.tv -- everything is linked from there).

If on the other hand, you are really jazzed about the Light Princess game concept, MacDonald's work, or our game-play concept and would like to continue this project (i.e. take it over), please feel free to contact Terry (digitante at gmail dot com) about it. I will be more than happy to give you anything we've got (hopefully it's already all online) or talk to you about it and possibly transfer the domain name (which I've mostly held onto out of nostalgia, to be honest).