OpenGameForge.org is a free open source game and mod development community focused on organizing game projects for collaborative development and providing various services to support the game development process. There are many game development communities with relatively large numbers of programers and hundreds of mod development communities with huge numbers of content developers, and a growing number of open source project hosting sites, but it seems no one has managed to bring those two diverse groups together on a single project hosting site - until now. By bridging the massive divide between game and mod developers we hope to recruit the critical mass necessary to tackle some large projects on par with AAA commercial titles.

OpenGameForge.org started as a community building project by the Openlancer Project to provide a community base to support ongoing Openlancer development and to create a new general resource site for open source games. The Openlancer team was frustrated by the lack of resources available from modding sites (specifically The Lancers Reactor), lack of coordinated development on SourceForge.net, and lack of open source focus on GameDev.net. To realize the ambition behind Openlancer, a "dream game" in every respect, we had to build some large scale infrastructure, then get a lot of people together, and distribute chunks of Openlancer development among many smaller seemingly unrelated projects. Starting this from scratch is essentially a gamble, only sheer determination has kept it going thus far but we hope that will change in short order.

OGF1.0 was a clone of our Openlancer site but ended up a general failure, so we started over from scratch with OGF2.0. Just prior to starting OGF2.0 we formally split OGF off from Openlancer so it could take on a life of its own. This includes a mission, vision, and some long term goals which extend well beyond the scope of supporting on going Openlancer development. We also split off the entire Openlancer game engine and various sub-engines as community commons middleware projects. We hope other game projects will find our middleware useful so they will help with development.

OpenGameForge.org Mission

Bring together free open source game projects to support collaborative development on common goals between projects and build a robust community commons resource base.

OpenGameForge.org Vision

Establish a major hub of free open source game development capable of completing all founding projects and forming into a non-profit foundation to further the advancement of our interactive medium.

Long Term Plans

Our vision ends with the formation of a non-profit foundation. This can serve as a legal front to preserve and if necessary protect community developed intellectual property. A legal entity can enter into contracts to, for example, publish collections of community games as retail products. As a non-profit and with some heavy fund raising, we could provide financial support to leverage community initiatives, hire community members full time, place bounties on some of the most challenging development needs, and continue to provide high quality hosting services.

There are an endless array of possibilities but this will only become a reality if the community pulls its resources together and really works for it.