Good Question.Have you ever played Angband? I did, and honestly I don't know about anyone who played Angband seriously and never had the desire to change something, edit the sources or build a completely new roguelike game from scratch.
Actually, someone even succeeded in adding features or changing something.But, have you ever looked at the source files of Angband?... I did, and honestly I don't know about anyone who did this and didn't think "what a huge amount of stuff!". It's easy to understand how this discourages the 99% of the people willing to write a good game, even when they have brilliant ideas. They would like to concentrate in writing the game itself, but they know they would end up writing thousands of lines of C-code just to manage the game data.
So, a first reply to the "why?" question could be a simple "to help anyone willing to create a new roguelike game". And, by writing "help" I don't mean to help creating a roguelike game, but creating a perfect roguelike game.
With this target in mind, we first thought about making a pre-coded "blank" roguelike game with a lot of customizeable files in it. But, in programming the game engine, we would have had to make a lot of assumptions, sacrificing a big part of the overall customizeability. Even worse, all games based on that game engine would have looked very similar, and this would have been exactly the opposite of what we wanted.
With ORCS! we have chosen another approach: we tried not to help by writing part of the game code, but by making the programming itself more user-friendly. That is, you would still have to write your own game from scratch, but you could use a powerful tool to do it much faster and better: a complete object-oriented language specifically designed for writing these games.
And this without any compromises. Not only you wouldn't have to sacrifice anything if compared to the same game written in C/C++, but you would instead have some more language customizations and features which are unavailable to C/C++, and which would make the game code much smoother, more elegant and, especially, simple to work with.
After all, ORCS! is not meant as an exclusive tool for experienced programmers, but also for mid-experienced computer users willing to build something with their hands.
But there is another reason which made us planning ORCS!: the need for new game structures, completely new internal schemes, free of all those small idiosyncracies which have been attached like fleas on almost every roguelike game for numberless years, as, for example, the unavailability of a serious hi-res graphic interface.
Yes, I know this is a painful and dated problem, but let me explain what we think... many roguelike gurus think that a top-graphics interface would kill the atmosphere and the taste of a good roguelike game, and games like Diablo by Blizzard, with stunning graphics, but very few good ideas and little game long-term playability (despite the announcements) prove them right. But adding a good-looking graphic interface to an existing roguelike game wouldn't kill it for sure. It wouldn't make it more "trivial", nor "simpler", nor less complex. It would simply add taste to it. If the underlying game engine is good, a neat graphic interface can really make the game more exciting and pleasant.
But there's more... the server-client structure of ORCS! will make it possible an even more interesting approach: since the server-software running the game will be separated from the frontend interacting with the user, it will be possible to make more frontends, ranging from ol'&good traditional vt100-like textual interfaces, to last-minute high-detail 3d-OpenGL based graphic ones.
As a last thing, thanks to the nature of the ORCS! source and compiled files, when ORCS! will reach its final stages of development no porting will be necessary anymore. Once a game will be written on a platform, it will be immediately available for every other platform, with no recompilation nor porting of any kind. Both the sources and the compiled files, infact, will be system-independent.
Is this enough? ;-)
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