Community to build a game

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Oroton
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Community to build a game

Post by Oroton »

for the last few years I've been dreaming of a game to make, I have the foundation ideas and story races, characters plot, but putting it into creation is a very long process, i would rather build an engine than a game.

an engine, that makes events, maps, sprites, npcs.

I have a platform already, written in JS, with events, tile based maps. sprites (I just finished animating), NPCs Enemies, combat and inventory. I have started to save all variables to a database so i can save states and load changes from the database.
All i have have to do is pull apart to make it editable in an admin/gm panel.

it's slow and tedious I was wondering since last major projects weren't my own but I worked on them in a community.

Is this a more effective way to complete projects?

For instance, Halls Forsaken Sanctum has all the basic features I would want need but not the gameplay style i would want...
The link below is the project i'm working on.

http://www.brissyriders.com/turtlewiz/index.htm

this would have the style of gameplay
the animated sprites is uploaded below with the code to run yourself. (i just have to add the armour sprite to.

Anyways back to the question, would a community built game be better, and how would one fine people to work on the project?
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a_bertrand
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Re: Community to build a game

Post by a_bertrand »

If you are able to build up a good team, then you may end up with a better result, as sharing ideas, tech and efforts lead usually to better results. However from my own knowledge, for this sort of projects, you may very well be better served to at least start alone, and in case you work with others never really count on them for the completion of your project.
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Jackolantern
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Re: Community to build a game

Post by Jackolantern »

We have experienced first-hand here just how difficult it can be to get a community-built game up and running. In the end, if the project is successful it will usually be on the back of just one or two members. I think the major problem is that everyone has their own game ideas and vision of how they want things done. So it is extremely difficult to get people to drop their own game ideas and pick up your own. Of course they would expect to have input into the project, but everyone understands that only one member is going to be able to set the genre and basic foundational decisions of the project.

There is also the pretty well-documented issue for community development where the people most willing to join your project are the people with the least amount of skills to actually turn out required work. Oftentimes these members want to join so they can learn. That isn't a terrible thing in itself and it is a solid way for people to get their footing in game development, but it can cause problems when there are miscommunications about what exactly the new member will be able to do and assist with. The people who do have the skills to really contribute are often busy on their own projects.

So I second Alan's advice. Start on the project on your own. In that case you may be able to attract some people to work on the project with you. This is a very different situation where people are coming onboard based on the strength of the work already done. Once people can see and play early versions or prototypes of the game you may be able to gain members based on that. But at that point you are likely going to be setting up a well-defined team versus a loose community to carry out development.
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hallsofvallhalla
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Re: Community to build a game

Post by hallsofvallhalla »

Agreed. I have found that finding a few good members that you know can do what they say and want to is way better than dealing a with a community that will come and go.

Love the game so far. It reminds me of the old adventure game from Atari that was very popular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(Atari_2600)
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hallsofvallhalla
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Re: Community to build a game

Post by hallsofvallhalla »

Double posting here but if you could come up with a way to make the collaboration easier that would help too. It is often hard to know what to do or where to go next with a community project. Having a list of to dos and then completed, then approved would help and give people easy access to work on it but not destroy it. For instance an approval spot where the code can be tested then someone approves. A place to show the graphics or GUI changes.
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Jackolantern
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Re: Community to build a game

Post by Jackolantern »

Yes! A good system to allow collaboration is absolutely required. Today, a good combination would be Github and Trello. For a remote team Github would allow multiple people to be working on code files at once and to give the core members the ability to merge other member's changes in the main branch, while Trello seems to work well for a lot of teams to handle the To-Do lists and other communication. There are alternatives, of course. Something like Jetbrains' TeamCity could kind of serve both purposes but much fewer people are familiar with it so there would be a learning curve.
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Oroton
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Re: Community to build a game

Post by Oroton »

ok, so lets say i have my project and I want to make it an engine where from an admin tab I can make more monsters, tiles, events, npcs and such...

and then make the game it self.. How would you find people to work with to make such a project on GitHub or Trello or other things mentioned
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a_bertrand
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Re: Community to build a game

Post by a_bertrand »

Beside there is already tons of "engines" or games which do what you are telling (admin panels to create monsters, quests and more), I would go the other way around. I would work on my engine, show case it in some forums and invite those interested to join in.

Or you could start with an existing code (open source), and work on it, when you have something again invite people to join in.

Why am I saying to wait to have something to show? Because in this field many are just people with ideas, but never goes beyond that, so for somebody which actually can and do produce something, joining a team which is just vaporware is a waste of time. So unless you make something with friends of yours which already knows you, you will be much better served to have a starting point.
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Jackolantern
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Re: Community to build a game

Post by Jackolantern »

Speaking open source engines, I just updated the big engine/codebase list!
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Oroton
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Re: Community to build a game

Post by Oroton »

Which other engines are you speaking of a_betrand
The only one I saw was New world Engine.
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