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[bluemonkmn]

I have been interested in what might be accomplished by combining the efforts of multitudes of people into a single game. Rather than putting the burden on one or few developers, spread it out over potentially hundreds of people. I feel like a lot of games that involve exploration have a lot of areas (closed doors etc) where the player is thinking "I wish I could see what was behind that door" or "I want to jump up there and see what's there", but of course the developer never realizes this and doesn't have the time to expand in every direction that might look interesting.

My initial thoughts were, let me just start a Wiki with nothing more than a statement of this idea, make everything completely open-ended and see what develops. Let people not only start the game, but develop the idea itself (including the description and development of the idea on the wiki). But thinking about it further, I realized that people need more than an idea to draw them in. They need some demonstration and attraction that shows them this is already a worthwhile project or the idea will never be more than just an idea. (I guess I can't start out 100% crowdsourced.)

With that in mind I built on my already-existing Scrolling Game Development Kit 2 engine to make a starting point for a game about which I might be able to make an intro video, and show people how to participate. What I have now is a project called iotaBuildIt, and there's a video introduction and tutorial on YouTube.

My question is, do you think what I have so far is sufficient to get people involved, or can you think of ways that will better invite people to be involved in this project and get it off the ground?

[shig]

Where does one go to contribute by adding better graphics?
I think this has some future but you should expect to do this shit practically all alone for a long time until it starts picking up.

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

Where does one go to contribute by adding better graphics?
I think this has some future but you should expect to do this shit practically all alone for a long time until it starts picking up.

Follow the tutorial after downloading the Scrolling Game Development Kit. You should be able to edit exactly anything that you desire.

[bluemonkmn]

Where does one go to contribute by adding better graphics?
I think this has some future but you should expect to do this shit practically all alone for a long time until it starts picking up.

Is this a question or a suggestion? If it's a question, the answer is to go to the "Graphic Sheets" folder in the SGDK2 IDE and add a new graphics sheet (then build a frameset on it, which you could use in a tileset or sprite definition).

Do you think making a new video demonstrating the process of contributing new graphics would draw significant interest?

I have been working on SGDK for 12 years (if you include version 1). But I suppose iotaBuildIt is a mostly separate and new project on its own timeline now. I wouldn't want to put another 12 years into this only to find out it went nowhere. The whole point of this project is to have other people involved, so it'd be nice to get a number of people involved earlier than later. There are already a few people involved. So at what point do more people decide to take an interest? Is the decision based primarily on how many other people are involved, or how interesting the first impression is (the video), or how inspiring the idea is? Clearly there's more to it than just time because after 12 years of SGDK work, there are still only a few active followers that I'm aware of. I must be missing something. Some lack of critical mass leads to a smolder or a fizzle instead of an explosion, so my guess is that there needs to be a lot of interest all at once in order to avoid a fizzle. Do you think that's true? And is there anything in particular that would start this project off in a better direction, or is it starting out as best it can?

[shig]

I looked around trying to find how to do that but somehow missed it. Thanks.

Wasn't a suggestion or anything, it's just the way these things usually go. I would be interested in seeing this picking up and spawning similar projects.
I don't know how to make this grow up faster, but why don't you try the usual? Getting links to your project from gaming news sites or reddit or imageboards or whatever else? Just saying.

[bluemonkmn]

I guess my problem is I'm not terribly familiar with "the usual" methods. Sure, it seems obvious to try to get links from a lot of sites, but I don't want to be a spammer, and I fear that soliciting for links might turn more people off than on. I get a feeling that people despise advertising and especially anything smelling of "spam". So I suppose I could use some tips on "safe" ways of getting connected that won't turn people off.

[LiquidAsh]

Hey Ben, this is Gary.  It's been a long time, but I wrote Ethereal Peace using SGDK1 (when it was simply known as SGDK).  This looks like a cool project!  I just played the video, and am curious to give it a go.  I think that there are two sides to increasing involvement: 1) having a big cool game world that motivates people to play and eventually contribute, and 2) minimizing and removing barriers to entry.  Your video is a good start, but it's length is a bit telling in the kind of investment required: installing and learning SGDK2, Mercurial, SourceForge, and how they are used together by iotaBuildIt.  Maybe a simpler interface to submit smaller changes would be helpful.  Imagine an html interface (while playing) that allows someone to upload a new graphic for an object to use (without requiring any of the software listed above).  Then as people get more invested, maybe they could develop an object with SGDK2, and upload it to the game (still through browser).

As an aside, I'm very curious about SGDK2s HTML5 builds.  If I remember correctly, SGDK1 was developed using VB.  Did you have to write a custom HTML5 engine, or were you able to automate porting to HTML5 in anyway?

[bluemonkmn]

Gary! Wow, it's been a long time; fancy finding you here, and great to hear from you. Yes, you have echoed my fears precisely. I started out thinking that I should have some sort of HTML interface to submit changes someday, but kind of backslid and forgot about my initial plans until I ended up where I am. I think my decision at one point went along the lines of "yes, we should have a very simple interface and one that can be accessed via HTML like the game itself, but let's start out with what I already have available and build up to it instead of trying to jump in all at once." So thanks for reminding me there is still much to be done. And I hope someone taking an interest in the project can help me develop such an interface. I think that may have been another forgotten idea: announce the project in its current form, but try to evolve it to the full HTML interface with the help of early adopters that have some coding/HTML expertise.

I did worry about the complexity of the process, but the experts who were already on board were commenting on how remarkably simple it was with the help of the video. Of course that's going to be the impression of an expert, and we do need to consider the impression of a newcomer. So rather than developing more videos, maybe our efforts should be focused on simplifying the process. Maybe it can start by developing a simple map editor that only allows you to edit maps and not graphics etc, but handles much of the publishing and sharing work behind the scenes somehow, maybe not even through Mercurial.

SGDK2 is C#-based, and was for a number of years before I introduced HTML5 support early this year. C# and Javascript have a lot of similarities, but a few differences. The projects designed in the pure C# versions most likely won't work when exported to HTML, especially if they had custom source code added. But I managed to implement most of the C# "rule functions" in JavaScript, and now if you define sprite behaviors using just the rule editor, most of them will come through to JavaScript just fine, allowing you to play the same game as compiled C# or as HTML5. But there is a significant amount of engine code (all customizable of course) written purely in JavaScript. The SourceCode tree exposes both .cs and .js files (and 1 html file), and both can be edited to affect both the C# and HTML5 frameworks. I think it's pretty cool, but a lot of people probably don't get an opportunity to enjoy the full depth of it without getting deep into SGDK2. It's hard to explain it all in a short post like this, but I think the interesting part to come away with is that one can customize the .cs and .js files to define their own functions, which are then exposed in the drop-down list of available functions when defining rules for sprites to follow.

Yes, SGDK2 was very very different than SGDK (a total rewrite). So no more VB, and no more DirectX (although SGDK2.0 did run on DirectX for the first few releases until SGDK 2.1 switched to OpenGL). Sadly the deep differences meant that there was no converting SGDK projects to SGDK2. But I think it was a worthwhile trade off.

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

This project seems to be picking up gradually. If only more people would give their opinions about what needs to be done. (Literally too, seeing as how this is how the game is made)