# Interview with JugandoEnLinux

### Hello thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions first of all can you tell me what is Veloren?

Hey, thanks for the opportunity! Veloren is an open-source, open-world multiplayer RPG. It has aesthetics similar to Minecraft, with the voxel look. Veloren is originally inspired by Cube World, and so we focus more on exploration and combat rather than building. You can team up with your friends and go conquer dungeons, or hop on an airship to take a ride across the countryside! We're just about to release version 0.11, which adds a lot of new monsters, ways to fight, and much more.

### When did you start this project? Who had the original idea?

I personally joined the project at the beginning of 2019, but the project itself was started in May 2018. Zesterer, the project's founder, suggested on Reddit that an open-source game inspired by Cube World wouldn't be too hard to work on as a community. Several people were interested in this prospect, and development started.

When I joined the project, the team was just starting to transition to a new engine from scratch. This gave me a great opportunity to get integrated with some of the building and testing parts of the game, as well as revive the blog. For me, the blog was a way to be able to talk with the core developers about what they've been working on. However, for the project, it has allowed many people to see how the development is going every week.

### In what way did Cube World or Legend of Zelda inspire Veloren?

The project originally started because a group of people who loved Cube World wanted to see the area explored by a group of developers in the open. We loved the art style, the multiplayer experiences, and the ability to explore a vibrant world. So although it was a great starting point, we started to find our own distinct path from Cube World quite quickly. Our visual style blends realism with the voxel world, so although everything is made of cubes, we still have realistic sky, water, and terrain.

### How many people are there in your development team ? What are their roles? How do you organize yourselves?

Over Veloren's development, we've seen well over 200 unique contributors. We can quantify this pretty well from who has contributed to our code repository, but there are also many people who have contributed in other ways. From coming to design meetings, to creating art assets such as sound and models, so many people have put a part of themselves into Veloren.

However, for the core team, we have about 15 people. We have several working groups that focus on different parts of the project, such as combat, design, and rendering. Each group has a lead that coordinates more with the other team leads. With this structure, we have enough communication to allow us to move quite quickly. I'm personally the lead of the meta working group, and I focus on items like the blog, our cloud infrastructure, and community outreach.

Internally, we try to have as little bureaucratic overhead as possible. We have weekly meetings that last around an hour, but during the rest of the week, we favor people over processes. Since we don't have set work times, people can chat as much or as little as they like on our Discord.

### As you know Linux has been promising for the video game industry or some years especially since Valve took a big interest in its development. What do you think of Linux as a game platform?

For Veloren, building for Linux is a first-class priority. Most of the developers use some form of \*nix as their main development environment, and we ship the game through several package Linux package managers.

In general for the game industry, Linux as an operating system to ship to has become almost standard. Wine and Proton allow gamers to play more games than ever before, and Steam is making large steps with the Steam Deck using an Arch-based OS. For Rust developers however, building for Linux is trivial. In fact, in some cases, it's an easier build target than Windows.

### Does your team use Linux for any part of game development? And any open source tools for example blender, krita etc?

As mentioned above, most of our developers use Linux. This goes for anything that is part of the pipeline; from coding the game, to testing on Gitlab, to the game servers, and a lot in-between. However, we let artists use what they are most comfortable with for their work. For example, all of our voxel models are created with MagicaVoxel, which is a free, but closed source piece of software. When it comes to audio work, there are also several tools that are used. For animations, we have discussed using Blender, however, for our needs it's easier to write them in-engine.

### Why did you use rust and do you consider it a language that helps to develop video games compared to other more established ones?

Originally when the project was started in 2018, Rust was chosen as a low-level language that was showing a lot of promise for game development. It offered a lot of guarantees around memory safety that other low-level languages like C++ didn't. It turns out this investment in Rust paid off many times over. The game development community in Rust has grown significantly, and with it, many new crates (Rust's libraries) are emerging. We're working closely with the gfx-rs cutting-edge graphics technologies for our rendering pipeline. We've heavily adopted the Entity Component System paradigm, which allows Veloren's multiplayer to scale very well on multi-core servers.

Today, there are several large engines built in Rust that are allowing developers to release games on PC, Mac, Linux, and mobile. In the future, we're expecting to see a push towards consoles as well. Although several years ago the game development space was quite barren in Rust, it is now much more lively. Rust has enabled our team to work at breakneck speeds without nearly the same worry of breaking someone else's code.

### The million-dollar question when can we expect a version 1.0? Do you have a road map to that end or are you just seeing what happens?

Wouldn't we all like to know! For us, since Veloren has always been a hobby project, we don't feel the need to have strict deadlines on when 1.0 should be released. Instead, we are aware of the items that would need to be completed for us to start thinking about it:

1. Story and quests

In Veloren, you can create a lot of experiences with others while playing multiplayer. However, there is still a large need for the game itself to give you tasks to do. A lot of foundational systems are in place to create a living, breathing world, but players don't interact with it very closely. There are economies between cities and generated history that has been created, but this isn't conveyed to the player through some type of questing system.

Recently, work has been done to create a "spot" system, which allows locations around the world to be generated dynamically. This is needed for a quest system that can be one with the world.

2. An entity formed for the project

Veloren is aiming to become a non-profit organization. This will allow Veloren to release on Steam, and be recognized as a proper entity. It will also give structure to the project. We've been working well as a team that can change as the project grows, but by becoming a legal entity, more guarantees will be added, such as periodic board meetings.

3. A strong modding community

Although we're creating a great base game, we want players to be able to create their own content. This might include models in-game, different rulesets to play, different UIs, or whatever people can imagine. We're working on building this with a plugin system. Players would be able to download plugins from a central source, and the game will interface with them.

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There are also many other things, however, if these large problems are solved, it would give us a much better perspective on what 1.0 could look like.

### I know that you put a lot of effort into spreading the word about Veloren's development through your blog "This week in Veloren" at home we follow all the news. I also know that you have a funding project in open collective. Do you have a funding and marketing plan in that respect? Considering that the case of blenders success is a reference point for many projects now.

We do have several opinions on this topic. First and foremost - the game must always be free for people to play. We are also very against the idea of exploiting players through microtransactions and other business models of similar nature. We have examined several means of revenue: donations, releasing on Steam, and server hosting memberships. So far, we've only implemented donations through Open Collective. The monthly amount we make, around $150 USD, is enough for us to keep our servers running. In the future, we aim on becoming a non-profit, which will allow us to explore a Steam release properly.

### Lastly I would love it if you could tell us if there was any way that fans could collaborate or contribute to Veloren.

The best way to get involved with the development is to join the Discord community (we also have Matrix and IRC bridges). There, we work to onboard people who want to help with the project, whether it be developers, artists, or anything in between. There are a lot of jobs that need working on, so even if people don't know how to code, there is a lot that can be done! Veloren is built by a community that wants to see the game created, so we love when fans can help out. We try to keep development as easy to approach and as open as possible, so maybe we can see you there!

On behalf of JugandoEnLinux it has been a pleasure to interview you. We congratulate you for taking Veloren to such a high level of quality and success and wish you all the best for the future.