Contributor Hey everyone! I'm Austin

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skate54345

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Hey everyone! my name is Austin Kelly. I am in my last year of school at NAU in Flagstaff Arizona. I was looking into applying for GSOC this summer and when I found Terasology it seemed like a dream job to me. I have been gaming my whole life and some of my favorites are the Souls series, Minecraft and System Shock 2. I made a mobile tilt-based jumping game recently using Unity Engine and loved the aspects of working on a game from scratch. I am very interested in contributing to this project regardless if it is counted under GSOC or not. It would be great if someone could point me in the right direction for some simple coding projects to contribute to so I can familiarize myself working in the environment. In my free time, I also record/mix/master bands in my area and would be super interested in creating sound effects or music for the game as well if there are any openings.

Here is a link to my recent game I put on the google play store as well as some technical stuff.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.AustinK.CS399Game&hl=en
  • Name: Austin Kelly
  • From: Arizona USA
  • Github: https://github.com/skate54345
  • Skills / Tools: Java, Python, C#, C, C++, HTML, CSS, SQL, Graphic Design, Audio Engineering
 
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Hey there, welcome! :)

GIB SFX PLZ! Er, I mean, yes, we do in fact need some fine assets of the auditory variety at some convenient period of time. Pretty much everywhere, it hasn't been a very active area over time.

In addition to Terasology if you've got Android experience you might want to check out our Destination Sol project as well. It also has some GSOC potential :)

For Terasology did any of the ideas on the GSOC list stick out? Easier to guide with some beginning clues like that. For general introductions and such see the dev docs and some of the tutorial repos on GitHub.
 
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skate54345

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Awesome. Thank you! I actually have already started with some new sound effects, as well as fixing a couple of the current ones that have latency issues.

After further looking into the GSOC ideas, I definitely have my eye on expanding the GooeyQuests dungeon crawler system or creating something new instead if that's needed. I have lots of experience with all types of RPG's and dungeon crawlers and I would love to work on making the dungeons more varied, and a dialog tree for Gooey.

In general, I definitely have noticed that high risk/high reward systems make the loot or reward much more meaningful than games with a different setup. I think I have some cool ideas about making some almost rogue-like elements to help make it more engaging. I think the idea of changing the world positively or negatively is a good one and would add some really unique gameplay. My general idea on this would be to add a mechanic to the dungeons which would raise the difficulty by incorporating randomized (negative) world changes for the next dungeon. This would also drastically increase the rewards in some varied way. I would also make sure restrictions are in place to discourage dying on purpose just for the rewards.

I think it would be cool to expand on the dungeon system, making it feel familiar yet unique each time. "The Binding of Isaac" is a great example of a game that makes each run varied based on more than just stats. I think it would be interesting to focus on that ideology when approaching this and I would try to increase replayability based on variedness as well as rewards.
 
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Enhancing dungeons would be a great item :)

A lot of new modules have come out since GQ was created that could be used to improve it further. Equipment (including a character screen) already got hooked up, other stuff could too. Whether it should be a direct enhancement of GQ or a new gameplay template based on GQ I'm unsure, but that isn't a huge technical difference anyway.

One challenge for the current dungeon system to keep on the lookout for: dungeons are created in full when triggered. This can get problematic for performance reasons and prevents them from growing forever. Likely one enhancement that could even be a pre-GSOC investigation would be coming up with a way to pause dungeon generation when it has gone a certain distance, leaving a dormant segment opener that can then resume generation when a player gets near.

On a related but far more tricky note (more of a potential stretch goal): if two dungeons have generated near each other, especially with one or more such dormant segments, could we come up with a graceful way to connect them? Especially when we have more distinct chains of these structures generating. In MC one thing that would frequently happen is having multiple underground features (caves + mine tunnels + dungeon + chasm) step on each other turning the result into a mess. There should be a way to do that more gracefully, like categorizing in which order they should be considered, which are allowed to cross destructively (if a quake causes a chasm to form it is OK for it to tear across some mine tunnels that have been abandoned for years), and so on
 
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Heyo, I took a quick look :)

For starters you probably want to tweak the GDoc permissions so the doc is in "Suggesting" mode for those with a link to it, that way anybody can read and suggest things, but not edit. Makes it way easier to get more feedback.

As for the proposal itself you've got a pretty good beginning on it, nice work there. I left a few specific comments and think overall you need to focus on diving into some of the affected code areas (dungeon generation, the Behaviors system for AI, loot, equipment, dialog trees, any effect in mulitplayer, and so on) to get some more technical understanding for adding details to the proposal to the "how" rather than just have a lot of "what". It all sounds awesome but is very low on technical detail, which makes it very hard to estimate the overall scope.

Looking forward to a next round of changes, let me know when to check it again :)
 
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Added a pile of feedback just now! Sorry about the delay :)
 
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