In January 2005 I wrote the first version of freeVikings, and, very proud of my first game (it was funless, boring, often crashing), published it on the Internet. A lot has changed since January 2005. I'm not so proud of my first game. And, I think, it's never more funless.

FreeVikings now have several fancy features you expect a good game to have. It's usually stable, good-looking^[1] and extendable.

When the developers make their application scriptable, they don't usually do it for themselves but for the users. Or they say they are doing it for users (everybody knows that the software developers only do things for fun). FreeVikings are scriptable. It means...^[2] It means I want to give you the possibility of extending freeVikings with your own levels. You can catch Erik, Baleog and Olaf into your own traps. It seems good, doesn't it?

So if you like freeVikings, have just a small amount of time for playing around a bit, ... Go on reading and make the best freeVikings level ever seen. Or maybe you aren't familiar with programming Ruby and don't want to crate new levels, but you can paint better images than me (nearly everyone can!) and want to make vikings, their enemies or some level nicer - yeah! Welcome! We need you!

This development guide is being written in the time of creation of freeVikings v. 0.7. Some of the interfaces described below can be changed in the future. Please, inform me if you find out that the examples from this guide don't work or some interfaces don't behave as it is described here.

Everything in this guide is explained in the environment of unix-like operating system such as Linux. I would like to apologize to all the poor non-unix-systems-users.