Today, Google announced the projects accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code, a yearly event with the goal to encourage students to participate in open source projects. For many students, it's the first time working in a collaborative environment. We are especially delighted to announce that the ScummVM Team will support and mentor four fellow adventurers during their journey.

Dylan Servilla and Nathanael Gentry will both work on our Director engine. While Dylan's goal is to help with Lingo-related stuff like factories, Nathanael will start working on rendering routines. Both will eventually lead us to support at least Spaceship Warlock and The Journeyman Project.

We want ScummVM to be easily accessible to as many people as possible. This obviously includes localisation to help removing language barriers. This year, Aryan Rawlani will help improving support for languages written from right to left ('RTL') as well as adding proper Unicode support to the ScummVM GUI. Imagine ScummVM being available in every possible language one day and you might understand how important Aryan's work is. Besides that, Aryan will also work on the mechanics we use to detect your games in order to improve reliability and performance, which includes deep rework on how our plugin system works.

During GSoC, ScummVM also acts as an umbrella organisation for its sister project ResidualVM. Gunnar Birke will work on implementing support for the Wintermute 3D engine to ResidualVM. Wintermute 3D is the - you guessed it - 3D counterpart to the Wintermute engine supported by ScummVM which is only able to play 2D games due to the project's scope. Adding support for Wintermute 3D to ResidualVM will eventually allow you to run games like Alpha Polaris.

Brace yourselves - Summer 2020 is coming. Prepare for supporting our students on their glorious adventure. When your watch begins, follow their process on the ScummVM Planet.