Hunter is a 3D game in early development that started out as a learning tool to get my hands wet in the cool, cool art of video game programming. The first simple playable version will consist of a single level, first person perspective bow and arrow wolf hunt. Evil wolves have taken over your forest and you have to get rid of them. Well, they might not be evil enough to actually attack you yet... Give me a bit more time on that .

My vision of the world of Hunter involves plenty of outdoor environments, forests, rivers and mountains. Animals, spirits and magical creatures roam the land. The main character lives in the great outdoors and belongs to an ancient race of people well versed in the art of hunting and in tune with the magical energy emanating from the land. If any of that sounds interesting and challenging enough for you, no matter what aspect of video game development you are into (programming, art, music, etc), consider joining the team.

Currently Hunter only runs on Windows machines with reasonably recent video hardware. Since it is based on cross-platform libraries, porting it to other systems is possible and I'll get to it as soon as I can. To get the Windows installer package, go to the download page and click on the big green button to start downloading the latest version. If you are curious, previous releases are available from that page too, right below the main download link.

Use the following keys to move around:

• Forward : W or Up arrow
• Back : S or Down arrow
• Turn left : A or Left arrow
• Turn right : D or Right arrow
• Tilt up : E or Page down
• Tilt down : Q or Page up

Aim with the mouse and left click to shoot. Remember that you can only shoot while standing still. You are using a bow and arrow after all. When you kill all the wolves, you are done. Simple as that!

Hunter is being written in C++ and uses the following wonderful open source libraries:

• Ogre3D, a multi-platform and very extensible graphics library.
• PagedGeometry, an Ogre3D add-on to display large numbers of trees and other static objects.
• Caelum, an Ogre3D add-on that renders beautiful skies, clouds, sun, moon and precipitation effects.
• Some of the Boost C++ libraries.

The plan is to soon start using the FMOD sound library and the Hydrax Ogre3D add-on to render water scenes and effects. Although not much original 3D art has been created for the game yet, I have created some simple 3D models, rigs and animations with Blender3D, the best free 3D modelling program ever (but quite likely not the most user friendly). I'm planning to use it more and more to create 3D content for the game.

If you find any of this interesting and have the right skills or a strong determination to learn them and want to participate in the development of the game, simply contact me. The only thing I expect is to keep the vision for the game consistent. You can not really have a team if everyone has a different project in mind, now, can you? You are, of course, free to take all the source code of the game and start your own project. That is the nature of open source. I have learned a lot from other great open source projects and I would be very pleased if others learned from mine.

You can drop a message in the Forums or email me directly at engel_sanchez at users dot sourceforge dot net (email scrambled to avoid web bots collecting it and spamming me, sorry).