Anyone here doing freeware game design or coding?

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I've always wanted to build a computer game collaboratively. What always discouraged me, however, was that I wouldn't find people to design it with me (largely because I only advertised to colleagues at my local high school). I also worried that the game mechanics would be too innovative for most people to enjoy.

I'm more interested in building components of game mechanics engines than actual games, as they are more generic and could be used by other designers even if they fail to form a whole game. I would particularly like to build a "ruleset generator" - a program that could produce balanced, playable rulesets for certain types of games using computational classification and optimization techniques. A "random roguelike generator" would be particularly entertaining, and I know it can be done.

Is anyone working on a freeware game right now and does anyone happen to be interested in starting a project?

im interested in starting an FPS/RPG Zombie survival game . Single/Player and multiplayer and for it to have an online score board for people to share there SP scores. Id want it to be open source.

I am working on a game in my spare time, but I've been making games for 22 years. In my spare time...

Some random advice:

Start small, don't get overly ambitious
Don't reinvent the bicycle others may have assembled for you already
Don't drown yourself in big design documents which are rigid and may not translate to gameplay at all
Try incremental design, make something simple and playable, and build on it
Don't get a team until you have experience, otherwise you will be wasting everyone's time and nothing will be made

Also check out Dwarf Fortress and see how much of what you want to be doing, it already is.

Curtis, I wouldn't be able to take part in that project, as I assume it would require more than a few months to complete, as well as a graphics person to work on 3D models or sprites (ASCII graphics notwithstanding).

I should add, I can only program in C++ and Python, though I might learn Java or C# quickly. I also wouldn't mind working in QT. I enjoy designing and mathematically analyzing game mechanics, and can write parts of the game's plot, narrative, dialogs and/or anything else having to do with text. I have never done, and probably never will do, any graphics work at all.

monsterland, thanks for the advice! I painfully learned some of what you mentioned in previous years. As for Dwarf Fortress, it works using a game design philosophy that's very, very different from mine: I value emergent behaviour stemming from a simple set of rules, along with procedural generation, over providing a great variety of hand-made content (a lot of what appears to be procedurally generated in DF is in fact only randomly generated).

Do you host your games on any website?

I know a minute amount of BASIC and C, but I'm quite adept at QuakeC...which...doesn't really help much outside of Quake mods

Everything else involving game design, I'm just kind of okay at. Except modelling/animating, I've never really done anything more than just primitive cube shapes.