Jordan Brock sent me an email about a game he is working on with his team called Just Tactics (they are also working on a new website 😉 ).

Just Tactics is a free (for now) turn based, online multiplayer, 1v1, tactical war game involving squads and deck building.

They Follow the “Minecraft business model” in which they give the game for free at first and as the game development progresses they start charging money from lower to higher (so those who buy early get a better price).

The plan is to gradually build a community that can help test the game and enjoy it together (it is a multiplayer game after all).

The interesting thing is that they use the jmonkey engine and a lot of other open source tools but also give back to the community.

You can see the tools they have developed and released under the BSD license far from their dev blog, and they are always working on new tools !

Here is the email Jordan Brock sent me :

Hi Maxim,

Sorry, I am not a pretty girl.

We are working on a game called “Just Tactics,” currently available for Linux and Windows. Just Tactics is a Turn Based, Online Multiplayer, 1v1, Tactical War Game involving Squads and Deck Building.

We are using jmonkey engine and a lot of other open source tools. Our entire codebase is not open sourced, but some day it likely will be (right now what is not open sourced is our art assets and the game logic specific to our game, honestly not particularly useful to anyone). Any tool that we have made that actually would be useful to someone, we have open sourced, you can check them out on our devblog: http://devblog.htssoft.com/

For Just Tactics we have been doing QA testing for 6 months, so there aren’t many bugs left. The game is not quite finished (there are a number of art assets missing, mainly some paint and sound effects). However, Just Tactics is very much playable, and it is time to build a community of gamers that will love all of the tactical goodness packed into Just Tactics. We are looking to give away several thousand copies of the game, this will allow us to stress test our infrastructure, and also gets us to the ever important “critical mass” of gamers the community needs so that when you join the Quickmatch queue, you actually find an opponent.

We are using a “Minecraft pricing strategy.” Right now the game is free. As the game becomes more complete, we will start to charge a modest price for it. As Just Tactics gains more content, we will continue to up the price commensurate with what is reasonable. This creates an incentive to join the community now (especially now because the game is free 🙂 as opposed a traditional pricing structure where the game comes out as a finished product at a high price, and then some people delay their purchase until the game is in the “bargain bin.” We feel that the “Minecraft pricing strategy” is a better fit for indie games like ours. When we do start charging for the game, anyone already in the community is still good to go, you do not have to pay for DLC or anything like that. Even when we are charging, new players will be able to demo the game for free forever using a default army (which is a decent army, not crippled in any way). By letting you demo forever, it helps us to continue to grow the community, and it lets us simply ignore that part of DRM 🙂 When you grow weary of the default army, you can pay, and then you have access to everything (paying gets you everything, all units, all cards, all future units, all future cards, there is no “pay to win,” which is why having your fans join our community now, for free, is quite a good proposition for them 🙂

Check out some of these videos to see what the game is like:

First Look



Tutorial



Teleporters



Please check out the website (we have a web designer working on a nice design at this very moment I swear!)

The wiki is a good resource to learn how to play.

If you want to play a couple of matches add me as a friend on the client, I am ‘carnator’. If you join Quickmatch you will probably not find a match (tiny community = no one online looking for a match, this is why I am writing you 🙂 Hit me up with an email if you want me to hop on and play you 🙂

I think that some of your site’s fans will really enjoy the awesome Linux game we are working on (and, hey, it’s free!) I think that you will appreciate how we approach building the community, expanding the game, running our business, contributing back to the open source community, etc.

Cheers,

-Jordan Brock

So create a an account and download the GNU/Linux client while it’s free !