So I'm here today to talk to you about the computer game called Fridorid RPG. Fridorid RPG is, as the name implies, a role-playing game.

Is that supposed to work? Never mind. So Fridorid RPG is a role-playing game. It is fully playable and can provide you with about six hours of fun right now. In the game, you play as a creature from another planet, wakes up on earth in our future.

In our future, robots will have turned against their human masters and started attacking and killing humans. So basically, you wake up, you have to understand what's going on, you have to fight for your life, and you will be fighting against robots. The most obvious way of doing that is using weapons.

So we have melee weapons and we have ranged weapons, so you can use table legs or baseball bats or laser rifles if you can find them in the game. But weapons are not your only choice. You can actually execute programs on enemy droids. So the idea is that your character actually is part a knife and part a computer, and therefore it has the ability to execute computer programs.

Now, the enemy robots have a very lousy operating system with a lot of security problems, and basically you can send codes that they will happily execute. By the way, the firmware for the bots has been written by a company called Megasis.

So you can run code. For example, we have the calculateP program that will send some code to calculateP to enemy robots, and they will start calculatingP, and this will slow them down for a little while. As a special thing, we have one program that starts a mini-game, which, if you run

the mini-game, will turn your enemy to your side, so it will start attacking other robots. Free Trade RPG is a single-player game, so we try to have a very immersive environment, and something that can actually get the player emotionally involved. For that, we have about 20 non-playing characters with dialogues that we try to make fairly rich and interesting.

We have 10 original music tracks written by two different people over the years, and we have a fairly specific and consistent graphics style. Let's move on to our first screenshot. This is the main interface of the game. The resolution could admittedly be a bit better.

Here you see the main interface of the game, and at the left of the screen, you have the inventory screen open, with a few things that you can see. There is the iron pipe here, which can be used as a weapon. We have the explanation of what it does. Here you can see four programming books. I'm going to get back to it. You have an armor, you have a shield.

I think that should be pretty straightforward for anybody who's played games like Diablo, because the interface of Free Trade RPG is fairly similar. Alright, this is a dialogue in progress. Here we have a bender telling me about his brain and management pills.

Apparently he took too much of them, and it made him here. And now at the bottom of the screen, there are several options that I can click to select what to say, and make the dialogue go forward. As I said, we have 20 non-playing characters. We try to give the widest range of options possible every time, so quite a bit of work went into dialogues, because they have to be sufficiently complex for players to like them.

We try to put a few jokes here and there, and basically the dialogues are really central parts of the game, because this is how you will progress in the game, this is how you will get quests and items.

Here we have the programs screen, so as I mentioned already, you can execute programs. Some programs, like the Analyzer item for example, will be executed on yourself. Some of them will be sent to any robots. Here we have the explanation of what the currently selected program says.

And we have, yes, you can certainly see it, we have a field here called heat produced for each program. The idea is that whenever you execute a program, you use your CPU, and when you use your CPU, you will increase your temperature, and there is a maximum amount of heat that you can stand, and actually, if you want to run a program

and you reached that maximum amount, you can actually still run a program, but you will then enter overheating and start losing health points based on how much extra temperature you have. So we have the running bar, experience bar, and then we have the health bar and temperature bar. Here it is completely empty. Whenever I run a program, it will increase the temperature, and when it reaches the maximum,

I can actually still run programs, but I will start losing health points. You can gain health points by finding health potions on the map, and for temperature we have coolants, so we have bottle dyes, liquid nitrogen, and industrial coolants.

This is the minigame that I mentioned, so I'm not going to explain it because a significant part of the fun is to actually figure it out. If you win it, the enemy comes to you, sighs and fights for you. What is interesting is that this is actually the legacy of Free Droid RPG, which started off as a 2D arcade game,

which was called Free Droid Classic. It was a clone of the Commodore 64 Power Droid computer game. Basically you were playing a robot and you had to take over other robots and clean up a ship. The original source started turning Free Droid Classic, which is ended now, it works perfectly and nobody is working on it any longer,

and then started turning the 2D arcade game into Free Droid RPG, which is an isometric 3D game. At the beginning it was mostly two people, one Greyfist, who is still with us now, and one Coder who has the project.

I took over in 2004, and my focus was on getting more people involved, because by then the game which was mostly working, the basics were here, but for example we had unbalanced items, we had lots of laser swords or something like that, 20 laser swords, and it wasn't actually fun to play. The engine was good, but we needed a bit more work on the content.

I succeeded in getting more people involved, and the record we achieved was 5 active people at the same time. The problem is that very often it's only myself or another person who is active, and it's very few people for a game like this,

because there are lots of things that we should do in order to improve it, and we need a bit of help. So what does Free Droid need? We have a game that lasts about 6 hours right now. We can obviously increase the difficulty to make it last a bit longer. I think we've already been to the fullest extent of this concept.

Now we need more content, so we need more levels, we need more die rolls, we need more quests, we need more items, so that players can actually have fun for let's say 20 hours, which would be a good value for a single player game.

I mentioned that we have music, we have good music, we have people working on it, but we do have some effects. This is not very good because it has a negative impact on the emotion of the player when it doesn't get relative feedback of your actions. We need more graphic content, but everybody does. We need perhaps better development tools,

because the idea is that we're a very small team, as I said, we need more people, and having easier to use development tools would probably help us attract more people. And obviously, well, many of you probably didn't know about us already, so we're not very good at communication.

We have a game that we think is fairly great. We'd like you to spread the word about us. Try out the game, if you like it, talk about us. This is something that everybody can do. And if you find bugs, you know what to do. Okay, I think I've run through everything I had to say, so I have a little demo video that shows the game.

It's actually short, it lasts two minutes. If you want to see more, we can talk afterwards. And that's it. So, we do that for later, but I'm sorry I'm not...

Here we are in the city, which is a kind of safe place in the game. And this is where you will get most quests and talk to most people, because the outside of the city is surrounded by enemy droids, so there is many people who live outside of the city.

I have some time left. So otherwise, I forgot to mention that your character is actually from another world, and he happens to be penguin-shaped.

Now I have just one last thing. I have a bit more time left. So this is the contact information for Frideroid. If you want to try the game, the game is written in C. This is one thing I forgot to say. It is licensed under the GPR.

It's been around for a few years. We try to make a release about once per year. It depends on who is active, because as I mentioned, we're not many people, so sometimes real life gets in the way a bit.

But we like to make a release every year, and we're planning to do a new one fairly soon with a tutorial for the game, because players reported that it was a bit difficult to understand at first, and better development tools, so that people can actually help us on levels, because this is the thing we need the most right now.

I guess I have time for a question or two. Do we have questions?

Story improvement, also. What kind of story improvement? Most of the storytelling actually happens through dialogues.

So if you want to extend the story, it's actually going to be done with dialogues. And when you have the dialogue, you have the character for the dialogue, and that character has to be at a certain place, so you have the level to go with it, so you have to add the map, the character, and the dialogue. That's how we extend the story. For now, I don't know what to say about the story.

For now, it's enough. We're not thinking about extending it for now, because we can still elaborate a little bit. Without making a second act, for example, which is planned, but for later.

We have considered it, and we are a single-player game. Now, seriously, multiplayer games are different. You do not focus on the same things. Here, we really want to get the player emotionally involved in his actions, and this is roleplaying. What I saw, for example, of Diablo in multiplayer, it's a different kind of game.

It's really a different kind of game. Okay, I guess we're done then. Thank you.