Hi. Hello. Welcome. This is the thread for BMO development, news, and support.
You may be thinking BMO? Is this guy nuts? Does he work for the Bank of Montreal or something?
Well, I may be a little nuts, but I don't work for any bank in the country up north.
AboutBMO is a Ruby gem to help people of all sorts to be able to
easily create a site to host game jams. Whether it is a yearly jam, monthly jam, or a one-time jam, BMO's goal is to simplify the process of making a community driven game jam site.
Why?Most game jam sites are kind-of (really) awful. Wordpress hacks and PHP are not my idea of fun, so I thought that it'd be a nice challenge to make a better solution and open it up for everyone to easily use. Whether it's a site not being able to handle a large user load, missing some features, or just very difficult to navigate, the state of game jam sites is pretty weak.
Features- Themes
- Internationlization
- Reusable Teams
- Drag-n-drop Submission File Uploads
- Easily embedded SWF, Unity, and HTML5/JS games
- Jam Specific Voting Customization System
- Easy to Run Backups
- Downloading all Jam files as a zip and torrent downloads
- Light-weight Microblog Functionality Similar to Twitter
- Commenting on Submissions
- Ability to Favorite Submissions
- Detailed Analytics for Teams/User Submissions
Get Down and Dirty with the SpecificsBMO is built with Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a great language. Rails is a great framework for building web applications. They're fun to use and learn. I am using HAML and SASS because, well, HTML w/ erb and CSS are both kind of terrible.
The actual assets and files are going to be set up to use Amazon S3 by default. If you're interested in using something else, like, your own server, this is easily achievable as well.
My current production environment is hosted using Heroku, which has a nice free tier which should be sufficient for most smaller jams. There are handfuls of other options for Rails hosting as well.
What If I Don't Care About Ruby, Rails, Deploying, etc. But Want to Host a Game Jam?Oh! So you're not interested in programming or hacking around? That's okay (not really, everyone should program and mess around in the terminal). Well then I've got another solution for you!
Jam Alchemy.
(Name subject to change daily until I find a name I am happy with and makes sense.)With Jam Alchemy you'll be able to host a game jam on my own BMO deployment. I envision this being the overarching community for people interested in hosting and participating in game jams of all sizes. The Jam Alchemy community will allow users to have host privileges to put on jams and manage them.
Jam Alchemy is in the works to launch in late September.
When Will It Be Available?Good question! Soon! I want to release the source by October 2012. If anyone wants to deploy their own BMO by then,
please let me know!
What You Can Do to HelpLet me know of any features you'd like to see in such a thing and what you hate and love about current game jam sites.
Also, when the time comes for some testing of my production environment, I would love to have people try and break things.
(This is the best to put this thread, right? It's kind of outside of the realm of game development, but specific to game jams and competitions.)
Community
