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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Nov
19

Comeback, again

I’ve been absent or inact­ive for an age it seems, no excuses needed and none sup­plied. Well I’m back and I will con­tinue the con­tent man­age­ment research I star­ted; Con­tent Man­age­ment and all things about that.
In fact I have already head star­ted with a new pro­ject that I hope will gen­er­ate some­thing use­ful, at least we will get a series of art­icles about it.

For those who want a pre­view you can head over to the SVN and look at some odds and oddit­ies pas­ted there. In short I’m going for a “full” media pack, doing all con­tent that would be needed for a game

More to come soon.

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Feb
06

PARPG - Reviving the fun in isometric

Barra of FIFE-engine have star­ted a new pro­ject (I did these). The new pro­ject PARPG (Post-Apocalyptic Role-Playing-Game), will be an Iso­met­ric RPG (2D) inspired by great games like Arcanum, Plan­es­cape: Tor­ment and never for­get the ass-kicking-games Fal­lout 1 and 2.

It’s now in the plan­ning stage and that is fine by me, I like to see how new pro­jects grow and fall. Not say­ing this will fail, I have all con­fid­ence in Barra’s abil­ity to make this float. What I really want to say is: “Now is the time to jump in!” as in this stage your thoughts will have a chance of greater impact, as when this is in a move it will be a lot harder to make changes.

Skills I think would be really use­ful  at the moment are:

  • Draw­ing — concept art and doodles
  • Pen and Paper RPG exper­i­ence — Cre­at­ing a good gam­ing world (rule-set)
  • Simple 3D artists — Fast mod­els for ren­der­ing 2D graphic

Are you inter­ested jump in the IRC chan­nel #parpg at freen­ode or the forum and write an introduction.

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Feb
03

Actually creating a 'Shared World'

Once again my post will be influ­enced by m64’s blo­g­post, this time around it’s more about what was said on #free­gamer at freen­ode (IRC) about the named post.

‘Shared Worlds’ might be a dif­fer­ent thing to dif­fer­ent people, but here it’s all about shar­ing assets, his­tory (I won’t say story) and contributors.

There are some obvi­ous prob­lem with making/creating this ‘shared world’ without think­ing; here I list the things that pops out of my mind:

  • A lot of effort before any­one use it, if any will — wasted time for all
  • Hard for people to con­trib­ute to a world that is “non-existent”  no bound­ar­ies will lead to an unat­tract­ive bloated world
  • Will­ing con­trib­ut­ors without a com­mon goal, leads to end­less discussion

How can we rem­edy these prob­lems before they occur?

There are some as easy solu­tions as there are prob­lems; One is to use a pre-existent world, from let’s say a game that is FOSS and don’t have any con­nec­tion to a closed/owned world, the big­ger the game is the bet­ter. A prob­lem here could be cur­rent lead man­ager not agree­ing with this idea, to me that hangs on com­mu­nic­a­tion. So go out and find one for us!

Another way would be to set out from the real world, and adding some spice to it. Ima­gine tech­no­logy advances stooped in the early 1920, Titanic (still a boat) got to its des­tin­a­tion, the Eif­fel tower got blown away by gnomes who sud­denly appeared from below.. (this could go on). But this ‘solu­tion’ only solves the num­ber two prob­lem lis­ted. On the other hand it will solve any legal har­ass­ment, depend­ing in what we spice it up with. Any thoughts on this is greatly appreciated!

A way to simply solve the last of my lis­ted prob­lems is to get hold of a strong-willed lead, someone or someones who can hold fast to a vis­ion, pure blood into that, and make other people interested/fascinated. Is there a bet­ter way to make all who want to con­trib­ute, work toward a sim­ilar of not same goal?

Sim­ilar pro­ject that already are out in the wild got mentioned

They don’t really cut the cake but they are worth research: Biggest and best of the men­tions comes first Angels Fall First (AFF) — To me it is Star Wars and Star Trek sans ali­ens and Hol­ly­wood cliché, to bad this is not truly open for us. Second is the Tux world — to me this hardly even makes it to this list as it is some­what lack­ing in ingredi­ents, even white the aid of freedroid.

I almost for­got, go post your thoughts on the fgd forum too!

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Feb
01

Making use of the Community

TheAn­icent­Goat, have been tinker­ing with a dis­tri­bu­tion sys­tem that would make it easier to:

  • Get games
  • Con­trib­ute
  • Develop games

A Kit­chen and Sink sys­tem to most of us, but that depends on how it is made.

Per­son­ally I want to make it easier for non-devs to con­trib­ute stuff like: sounds, 3D mod­els and other non code stuff. Some­thing else then SVN, git, bazaar and other sim­ilar sys­tem, which is both hard to use for most people not doing code, and a bit too offi­cial. And let’s face it, they were not meant to man­age the assets of games.

I would like to see a sys­tem that could handle feed­back and gal­lery like fea­tures, and do this in a simple way. This is not what theAn­icent­Goat aims for at the moment, but I think it could be integ­rated in his Steam like idea.

The idea out­lined by TheAin­cent­Goat is more about mak­ing use of the com­munity.

Build­ing a com­munity that is not for one spe­cific game, that could make con­tri­bu­tion more com­mon. If we find the way to make it easy. There are a couple of things beside regis­ter­ing to a forum, learn­ing how to use a Revi­sion Con­trol sys­tem and becom­ing best friends with the pro­ject lead/developer, that hinders con­tri­bu­tion as it is now. Min­im­ising the fear of rejec­tion and mak­ing it easy to test ones con­tri­bu­tion is also of importance.

All these things is already pos­sible, but it is far from work­ing in a good way. How to solve this is what the cur­rent dis­cus­sion is about, join in at IRC freen­ode #free­gamer or in the for­ums.

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