Overview of the project
Unvanquished is a free, open-source FPS game with RTS elements, facing off technologically advanced humans against monstrous aliens. Players can choose either team, and must maintain a base while attempting to destroy enemy base structures. Humans rely on a broad variety of weapons and futuristic equipment, while aliens utilize claws, poisonous bites, and more (see our About page).
The game itself is under active development since more than 10 years, bringing new artwork, gameplay, and engine features to the community. Pre-alpha began September 2011, and our first alpha release was March 2012. We have made dozens and dozens alpha releases since then, and we released our first beta in 2021!
Here are some articles to give a sense of what we’ve been up to as a project:
- Unvanquished 0.54, ARMed and dangerous (2023)
- 10 years and Unvanquished (2022)
- Unvanquished 0.52 Beta is there (2021)
- Announcing Dæmon engine Beta 0.52 (2021)
- The Unvanquished launcher, and an engine hotfix (2021)
- Story of a tree (2018)
- Still on (space)tracks! (2018)
- 2014: year in review (2015)
- Maps of Unvanquished and Special effects (2015)
- Summary of gameplay changes (2015)
- Unvanquished: A Retrospect, Part I, Part II, Part III (2012)
We highlight the work of our contributors in our blog posts and our project receives regular coverage on major sites like Phoronix and LinuxFr.org, where we have been praised for the quality of our artwork for an open source project.
The team behind Unvanquished is an international one, and developers range from experienced hobbyists to professionals contributing their free time, all of whom are centrally coordinated on our chat and forums.
Contact
We are always looking to expand our team, and currently we would like to fill several positions to help bring us closer to the day we will leave beta! Although all positions are unpaid due to the non-commercial, open-source nature of the project, you will be fully credited for your work and it will be an excellent portfolio opportunity. The amount of time you can commit is up to you.
Like many open source project, most of our work is done in a public way, with public chat, forums and repositories. It’s always a good idea to join the chat in order to get familiar with the people involved in the project.
If you are interested, feel free to share your willingness with us in forums or if you need or want to be more formal, email our recruitment manager directly at apply@unvanquished.net. Let us know what you are interested in working on and a few examples of your work! Depending on the position, this can either be a personal website, a link to a coding profile, a formal portfolio, or simply a demo reel or a few image attachments.
Available positions
🧙♀️️ OpenGL wizards
Needed: highest
Our engine was famous in the Open Source community for its modern features but time is passing and we want to keep up with what people expect from games today. We need to finish our Portal implementation. We would like to finish our PBR implementation and re-implement dynamic shadows. It would be nice to implement interesting stuff like sRGB lightmapping (the way Xonotic does them) or realistic water effects for example. So we are looking for people who knows how to do magic with GPUs. In some case we would be able to redirect you to some known implementations you may adapt from other existing engines with compatible licenses.
👩🎤️ Sound designers
Needed: highest
We currently use some very old sounds effect from an old project we forked long time ago that was named Tremulous. Those sound effects have poor quality and Tremulous licenses are hard to track down so we better want to replace them. All files from the res-legacy package are looking for replacement.
👩🏫️ Translators
Needed: high
We’re going to translate the game again! Very long time ago, the game was translated in multiple languages, but some technical issues put this on hold. Now everything works again and we need you to help use translate the game in your native or favorite language! The translation is done on the Weblate platform, just create an account on Weblate and start contributing translations, it’s as easy as that!
👩🔧️ Implementers
Needed: high
Some of our models may be already modeled and animated and are just waiting for someone to implement them in game. For example we need someone to implement the first-person grenade hand-throwing view in game and we have some other weapons waiting to be replaced with their brand new models. There is a lot of code you can read from what was done for other models to help yourself in that task.
👩🏭️ C++ programmers
Needed: medium
Our games provides a virtual machine to run custom modifications. This virtual machine is currently based on Native Client (NaCl) but since Google deprecated it and since Webassembly (WASM) became the standard to replace it, we are looking for people helping us moving from NaCl to WASM. The task is expected to be far more easier than the port from Quake Virtual Machine (QVM) we did before, so we know it’s not too-much for one skilled man.
We also done a lot of work to upgrade our engine from C to C++, and have made huge strides in updating our inherited Quake 3 codebase. There is still probably some refactoring and optimization work to be done here and there, and an assortment of other projects that can be given to new programmers interested in contributing to our engine development.
💇♀️️ First and third-person animators
Needed: high
We presently have several player models that require animation, and further down there will be more, including some base structures. Models are provided in the OBJ format, and are exported to the IQM format.
👩🎨️ UI designers (HTML/CSS)
Needed: medium
Our new UI system is based off libRocket, which allows us to utilize HTML/CSS for the in-game interface. Designers can easily create new interface elements, such as HUDs to be used by both teams, new menu designs, and other means of extending in-game functionality. You can create new assets, or work off our pre-existing ones.
👷♀️️ Level designers
Needed: low
Our game ships with an assortment of maps, and it would be desirable to provide a variety of environments for our players. Maps for our game are made with NetRadiant, and we ship seven pre-packaged, shared texture sets that can be used for your work. You can also produce your own textures if you prefer.