Nov
20

Content Creation and Management

Or how to manage content contributors, the experiment.

tmp_helmchange

I’ve been curi­ous for a long time on what makes FLOSS games fail in the areas of User Exper­i­ence/Inter­face (UX, UI) and graph­ics, visual coherency, why they push second-hand gfx next to ace grade gfx. In my search for an answer I decided to start a pro­ject of my own to gather some first hand experience.

The aim for this pro­ject will be to col­lect as much con­tent as pos­sible for a small and simple game, at the same time; avoid neg­lect­ing any UI or UX related issue. No need for ace grade gfx just visual coher­ency. To be able to fin­ish this pro­ject in a reas­on­able time frame, I first decided on what type of game and which kind of theme it would have. My decision are based on per­sonal pref­er­ences what kind of “simple” game would I enjoy? It fell down to a Tac­tical Role-Playing Game in a fantasy set­ting, like Tac­tics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis, Final Fantasy Tac­tics and Final Fantasy Tac­tics Advanced. Mind you, I’m only gath­er­ing con­tent for it no code what so ever, that is for a will­ing developer to do if he or she find the time and will to do so.

Here I’ll give to you the mockup game;

Realp - Book of Tiny Bits

logo: Realp - Book of Tiny Bits

In my estim­a­tion I already got enough game con­tent to be able to make a game mech­an­ics test. And this in a very short time span. The ques­tion now is what do lead developers and pro­ject lead­ers miss when they do the same job. My answers at this moment would be; Time to com­mu­nic­ate (beside the obvi­ous; con­nec­tions)  here are some ques­tions I find important:

  • How does your con­trib­utor work?
  • What does he or she need, to do the things you want done?
  • Are the con­trib­utor able to work inde­pend­ently or does he/she need continuous guidance?
    • If so how could you rem­edy that?

cha_theif2

Don’t mind the 2D, it will be in 3D as might be seen in the SVN. The 2D images every­where, is my way of com­mu­nic­a­tion with con­trib­ut­ors, in this case tid­bit the 3D modeller.

How did/do I go about this project?

Well to know what con­tent you need you must decide on a couple of things, some of them I already told you about (What kind of game). To list some of these decisions, here are some of the fea­tures I have in mind;

  • Pro­ced­ural map generation
  • Move­ment by points of interest
  • In-game script­ing of unit behaviours

These help me under­stand what is needed; Without them I would miss much of the small things. So I actu­ally think of this ‘media pack’ as a full game, that way I hope it will be easier to adapt the media to other pro­jects too.cha_brute

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  • http://www.hardwar.org Andrew

    I checked out your blend files. Look­ing really good, keep the news updates coming.

  • http://tranberry.se Tran­berry

    Thanks Andrew, and yes they do look good! But the cred­its should go to tid­bit who made them after my doodles. I’m writ­ing the fol­low up as we speak, and I hope I’ll get a new post soon.

  • http://qubodup.net qubodup

    LOLOLOL and you said nobody would use it XD!!!

  • http://qubodup.net qubodup

    Hey T, how about adding a license to those graph­ics? :D

    Sci­ence of Iris2 is work­ing on a LOVE2D pro­ject which he prob­ably will show soon and would like to use the cuties :D

  • http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com shir­ish

    From what little I have exper­i­enced look­ing at games and try­ing to con­trib­ute, I would say a vari­ety of things :-

    a. There is no (exist­ing) pack of con­tent where everything is included and has same theme as in say RPG Gamer XP or other such pro­pri­et­ary game engines. While hav­ing a game engine is great, hav­ing some art which sorta go together would make it so much more. I am hope­ful that at some time in the future, OGA is able to have gamepacks at vari­ous res­ol­u­tions so people could simply use them for their game.

    b. Have played many an RPG (in Win­dows world) where the developers used the exist­ing art (not high qual­ity stuff and in fact reused almost all the same art, RPG gamerXP or whatever) but what they shone their skills with dia­logs and pace of story. While some devs. used mind-bending rooms and puzzles to keep the gamer enter­tained, the more inter­est­ing ones were where there is lot of humor.

    c. Some pro­jects under­achieve or are overam­bi­tious and then lack of com­mu­nic­a­tion with the com­munity as a whole as to how to achieve it. For instance I have been look­ing for this pro­ject http://dungeonhack.sourceforge.net/ for quite some­time now and atleast for a moment seems to be in haitus.

    d. Many pro­jects also do not plan and again fail to com­mu­nic­ate what things they would be work­ing in the near future.

    e. Last but not the least, writ­ing code which has some art of integ­ra­tion tests and what not would do won­ders. In quite a few pro­jects I see regres­sion hap­pen­ing which if they had made some sort of auto­mated tests stuff (like JIRA does) things would be more smoothly.

    That’s all about I could think of atm.

  • x

    Time to blog again man.

  • http://tranberry.se Tran­berry

    I just did.

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