Spice Trade

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#1

Colonize Europe!

Start from nothing and dominate another continent.
Spread the influence of your culture while creating your own empire!

Since the 14th century, Europe has been a global super power when it started colonizing other continents. But what if history had gone a different way? What would Europe be like if Asia had prevailed?

Abu Al-Qazzaz is the main character in Spice Trade. He is a poor young man from Baghdad, who has inherited a house and some land… oh, and he wants to get married too.

Abu decides to try his luck in the spice game. He has to prevent the European countries from gaining a trade monopoly. Will Abu be able to beat out the Europeans in the spice trade? Could Europe have been different?
How? You decide!

More screenshots

Spice Trade is a Java based, open source game that is a multimedia artwork as well as an adventure game.

Downlaod the game and source code from:
http://www.spicetrade.org/

//Juha

#2

ohhhhhhhhh, its 207 MB, ahhhhhh! a little on the heavy side?

#3

Yes, it is quite large, but you have to take into account that the game has:

  • Over 1400 pictures
  • Approx. 70 minutes of music
  • Over 500 dialog choices
  • Over 200 individual items
  • Over 120 help descriptions
  • Over 130 unique places you can visit
  • And so on and so on :wink:

//Juha

#4

Looks good but it owuld be a very good idea to set up a demo version with limited location, dialogs,etc… so that the download be a bit smaller, 200 megs can rebuke some potential players.
The art looks good, is that original art or are these scans from medieval paintings?

#5

What you REALLY want to do is use webstart. It has a lazy download feature so that you can play the game and it will stream-in graphics etc on-demand ;D.

#6

cyberyoyo:
Thanks for the response. The demo version is an interesting idea, but I don’t really have time or the energy to do that kind of thing. (The game took 1 1/2 years to make and I do have my day job and my evening school that needs some tending at the moment. Not to mention my fiancee…)

The art work is part scanned (and heavily reworked) from miniature paintings from that time (12th centuryish) and part homebrewn.

blahblah…:
Well, the game is open source, so you can of course make a web start version, if you want to. Just remember to release the source code etc…

My experience with Web Start is that it’s nice, but it has some issues (the game does write stuff to disk and uses Beanshell and so on and so on) with security settings etc. So essentially that would take a bunch of time and I’m not really sure that that is something I want to start going into. Perhaps later, but probably not, since visitors to the site keep on downloading the game.

Anyway, glad you all took a look at the game and hope you enjoyed it. Remember to take a look at the Exhibition page for printable postcards from Abu :wink:

//Juha

#7

To play devil’s advocate, I have to say that I’m a patient person. I don’t care if the game is 3k. If it sucks, then it’s a waste of my time.

On the other hand, if it’s 1GB, but one of the best games I’ve played, then it’s not a waste of my time. These guys will tell you that I’m in the minority, and they may be right. I love building/trading games. This one at least looks like it’s got a lot of time put into it.

Downloading it right now…

#8

Very interesting game. Well worth the download, in my opinion.

There seems to be some performance problems, however. At least for me, running it under either JDK 1.4.2_07, or the latest 1.5.0_04, the music skips, and loading times get worse the longer you play.

Otherwise, quite fun. Though, I haven’t yet figured out how to trade from city to city. I’ve got my export license already. I’ll just go read the FAQ.

#9

And, because it’s NOT webstarted, every minor bug fix will force you to download the entire game again.

Very foolish.

#10

Good job! The game is really beautiful with all those nice image.