Freshly Squeezed

Or how to manage content contributors, the experiment.

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

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?

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.

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