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When I started using Linux, which is quite a long time ago now, I wanted some games that would run on it, because I'd been used to playing the standard Windows games like Minesweeper (at which I was pretty good). And almost the first game I found turned out to be a whole lot better than Minesweeper. It was called Battle for Wesnoth.

Battle for Wesnoth is a ton of fun in a bun, on all sorts of levels. It's basically a strategy game with animated fighting units (but it's fine, there are no gore effects; the most horror-film thing that ever happens is if you bash a skeleton to death... er... undeath... er... destruction, in which case it falls apart in a little heap of bones). You move and fight with them individually, not in a block, which gives you a lot of choice about your actions. It's turn-based, so you don't have to react in real time (which I hate doing, because I find a lot of rapid on-the-spot decision-making stressful rather than fun). And not only are all the types of unit different - so an elvish archer has totally different strengths and weaknesses from a dwarvish steelclad or a human mage - but every individual unit has its own combination of traits that make it a little different from others of its kind. But that's not all! You can write your own campaigns! Needless to say, for me that makes it utterly irresistible, because you get to use programming and narrative skills and art (of different types) all at the same time.

So, for my first campaign, I had a very simple idea. Drop Ardsley Wooster from Girl Genius into Wesnoth (but, obviously, change his name and all that, because he's copyright) and then see how he gets on, because there's no unit in Wesnoth which is a spy, human or otherwise. Which, of course, meant that right from the start I had to create my own custom unit.

I got "Davenport" from the name of a Victorian character in Rentaghost, which was a programme I was allowed to watch as a child, and "Charles" was a more common name at the time than it is now; so Charles Davenport he became. Determining his game statistics wasn't too hard, as there was a human unit called the Footpad, and I could conveniently use that as a base for a spy. The essential thing was that he was not well armoured, but still good at defending himself due to his agility. I tweaked the Footpad stats a little, but not a vast amount. The difficult part was creating the sprite, because of course a sprite isn't just a single image. It has to be able to move and fight convincingly. Mr Davenport initially comes equipped with a dagger, a cosh, and a set of throwing knives, and later in the campaign he acquires a magic sword, so I had to do animations for using all of those; also, some sprites have idle animations, and so I was determined that my Mr Davenport was going to run his hand worriedly through his hair at odd moments, because Wooster does exactly this in the comics. So I ended up making quite a lot of little pixel figures in red coats.

He lands in Wesnoth seriously injured (hence why the bar on the left of his sprite is almost empty), and has to be healed as he and the elves who have found him travel through the forest. But they're not allowed to travel unhindered - there are some nasty vampire bats!

One of the first people he meets in this campaign is Aethelwenna, an elderly fire mage with a basically kind but very forthright personality. Here's some background art I did for one of my other campaigns (I liked her, so I used her a lot), showing her giving a skeleton archer what for in the shape of a fireball. I do like sassy old ladies.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the programming side, but one thing I will say is that it was often a challenge to program alternative ways to win a scenario other than the standard default "defeat all enemy leaders" (which is fine now and again, but if you do it in every scenario it gets tedious). So I had one where you had to break down a dam that some trolls had built (using forced dwarf labour, no less, so halfway through the scenario a bunch of dwarves shows up and starts fighting enthusiastically on your side), and the way to do that is to place a mage on each end... but you have to get past the trolls first. And there was another that involved chasing a very annoying mage who teleported, and you'd only have about eight or ten units so you had to position them with care. Getting those to work properly took a bit of thought.

The spriting, though - the character in the feature photo is Bronna. She's a human archer, but she was brought up by elves, so she fights very much like an elf and knows how to conceal herself in woodland in the same way. Her sprite was, as you see, based on the human Bowman, though her stats are much more elf-like. And, yes, she is black. Wesnoth is just a little bit too white, so I felt some compensation was needed (I've also done a couple more original sprites who were black). Here she is in action, early in the campaign which features her:

And then there's Narien here:

Narien is half elf and half dwarf, so she has some of the features of both types, which is an unusual and very handy combination. Elf and dwarf units in Wesnoth are very much complementary, but the general background owes a good deal to Tolkien (most things with elves and dwarves do), so they don't tend to get on unless you can find some good narrative reason for them to get on. So I wrote a campaign called The Elf, the Dwarf, and the Mage, in which the mage in question was Aethelwenna, the elf was her young friend Elithien (a healer), and the dwarf was called Alatos and was technically a fairly standard dwarven fighter, but he was, in the story, also a talented inventor of the rather steampunky engineering persuasion. Here he is, working at his forge:

And that meant I had a first-class reason to mix elf and dwarf units. Initially Aethelwenna and Elithien had to help Alatos escape from a bunch of drakes (like dragons, but clumsier); and so Alatos decided that this elf was all right, and Elithien decided that this dwarf was all right, and after a while each of them decided that the other one was so very all right that they fell in love and got married. Narien was their daughter. Elves, generally speaking, are great in forests and especially good at ranged fighting (their archers are second to none), whereas dwarves are great in mountains and caves and excel at melee. Narien, of course, could do a bit of both - not so well as a full member of either race, but her versatility made her a useful person to have around. It is very much horses for courses; mounted units, for instance, are very vulnerable to elven arrows, whereas most undead (other than the spectral types, for whom you really need a good mage or cleric) can't stand up against an enthusiastic dwarf with a hammer or axe. And, indeed, if you have a necromancer to deal with, then a pack of dwarves is your best bet, because you can certainly use Aethelwenna (or a similar fire mage) and she'll probably win, but she'll be so bashed up after the fight that it'll take her ages to recover; whereas a pack of stout dwarves will take a bit of damage, but they'll take them out before they can cause too many problems, because not even undead magic can do a lot about steel axes.

Quite a few of my Wesnoth characters spilled over into my regular writing, including Aethelwenna, Elithien, Alatos, Bronna, her best friend Trithsil (a dwarf), Lady Amariel the elven leader... and Kerian the bard, who appears as narrator in a few of my campaigns and who bears a rather suspicious resemblance to d'Artagnan (I did give him a lute, though). It really is the game that keeps on giving; and I learnt everything I know about spriting from it, which is quite a lot now.

I think it runs on Windows and Mac as well. So, really, what's not to like?