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2023-01-16
I know, the name may sound a tad pompous but it's really just an homage to old school codenames like, for example, Nintendo's Project Reality. I just remember how cool it was back then to start reading about many of these mysterious projects that were supposed to revolutionize everything. Peter Molyneux was also pretty good with his project codenames.
This by no means implies that this project is surely going to be grandiose or that Peter is coming on board to write a game on it. It's just a codename.
So what is Project Freedom and how did I get here?
Project Freedom is a fantasy console and it will one day run on the Analogue Pocket.
I've spent many years working in the game industry, maybe even worked on some games you may know. But then I got burned out and only eventually came back to playing games together with my daughter many years later. I eventually also got back to games programming because of Panic's Playdate and thanks to that really enjoyed coding again.
Although I've done some gameplay and engine programming in my career, my main interest was always tools. I have a platform-game project that I'm playing with but, every step of the way, this has just offered me opportunities to write more tools or low-level stuff that I thought was missing on the platform. I wrote a dependency manager named toybox.py and some libraries to help with various low level things or import data for my game. I always go back to tools and toolchains.
Over Christmas I got the Book of CP-System by Fabien Sanglard. I have a degree in electronics (which I've never used) and so this very quickly became a fascinating read for me. I started dreaming of something like the Playdate but which would also allow me to dig into the architecture, the SDK and the toolchain. I just haven't been able to talk myself out of this ever since.
There are plenty of projects already doing something similar, pico8, tic-80, arduboy or the Playdate too to some extent. So why do this?
One word: Fun.
Actually there are of course more reasons but this is, should and will remain the primary one.
Do I know everything needed to pull this off? Nope. Will it ever work? Who knows. Is it going to take a while? You betcha. Am I going to learn a lot along the way? Absolutely.
I always get frustrated when things are broken in a project and I can't just go in and fix stuff myself. So this is going to be as open-source as possible. Obviously everything from the Pocket down is not open source, but at least it's open and it's not out of the realm of possibilities to one day have that part re-engineered and open sourced too. A lot of that stuff is already out there.
But for now the goal is to build on top of the pocket, publish everything as open-source and chronicle the progress in this blog.
Taking a page from the Haçienda's famous original slogan: It must be built.
With ❤️ from Paris, France.