Edit: De-stickied in favor of new recurring calendar event
So we haven't had one of these for a while, or much of any solid structure, pretty much everything happens randomly, classic open source
In an attempt to help us coordinate better I'd like to come up with a set time every weekend to nominate as "office hours", which is the ideal time for anybody to make it on IRC to discuss design, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and play around on our headless server which we could launch each time.
No obligation, just if you want to check in weekly this would be the ideal time. The one-time meeting will likely go beyond an hour, office hours could be 5 minutes or 5 hours if we get a fun session on the game server going, people coming and leaving as they see fit, no solid start time, just a rough goal
To kick it off I'd like to do a dev meeting in the first such session, where we can also go over some recent topics of interest, such as "What's in an Alpha?" along with some others I've listed below. In the poll I've set suggested times, which focus around two windows on Saturday (sneaking into Australian Sunday):
A sample event for timezone calculations is available on timeanddate.com (example set to 10 am my time Saturday April 26th - might be the ideal time if Immortius is OK starting at midnight his time, or we could try 9 am / 11 pm, especially for the meeting, don't mind getting up "early" occasionally)
Please vote in the poll (results are public) with what hours you could make. If you're an active contributor and would like to make it on a regular basis, but will have an absolute obstacle with a particular time most/every week please post so and maybe we can avoid it.
The inaugural session / dev meeting would be the first Saturday the majority of core contributors can make it. That means it'll tentatively be the coming Saturday April 26th until enough people say that's a bad date (likely to happen and then we'll push it out a week or two)
Topics:
The money-related topics are more just to offer them in case somebody wants to throw money at us. We still don't actually have anything to seriously spend money on, nor any serious income, or plans to push for change.
A small-time sponsor did contact me lately wanting to help pay our server costs in return for a link to a player community, which is what made me want to run over the options again. If we get more than needed to pay the server it would be neat to put code bounties on something. Or just support random people tossing bounties on issues they care to see done sooner.
The OUYA thing is detailed on http://freethegamesfund.com - in short it is a contest running till August. I'm not even sure if stretch goals count or if you have to set your primary campaign target at 10k+. Severely doubt we could get anywhere near there anyway, but hey, crazy things happen. I'd volunteer to do all the organizing / legal / finance stuff.
So we haven't had one of these for a while, or much of any solid structure, pretty much everything happens randomly, classic open source
In an attempt to help us coordinate better I'd like to come up with a set time every weekend to nominate as "office hours", which is the ideal time for anybody to make it on IRC to discuss design, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and play around on our headless server which we could launch each time.
No obligation, just if you want to check in weekly this would be the ideal time. The one-time meeting will likely go beyond an hour, office hours could be 5 minutes or 5 hours if we get a fun session on the game server going, people coming and leaving as they see fit, no solid start time, just a rough goal
To kick it off I'd like to do a dev meeting in the first such session, where we can also go over some recent topics of interest, such as "What's in an Alpha?" along with some others I've listed below. In the poll I've set suggested times, which focus around two windows on Saturday (sneaking into Australian Sunday):
- US East morning / European mid-afternoon / Australian late evening
- US East afternoon / European late evening / Australian early (Sunday) morning
A sample event for timezone calculations is available on timeanddate.com (example set to 10 am my time Saturday April 26th - might be the ideal time if Immortius is OK starting at midnight his time, or we could try 9 am / 11 pm, especially for the meeting, don't mind getting up "early" occasionally)
Please vote in the poll (results are public) with what hours you could make. If you're an active contributor and would like to make it on a regular basis, but will have an absolute obstacle with a particular time most/every week please post so and maybe we can avoid it.
The inaugural session / dev meeting would be the first Saturday the majority of core contributors can make it. That means it'll tentatively be the coming Saturday April 26th until enough people say that's a bad date (likely to happen and then we'll push it out a week or two)
Topics:
- The "Office hours" idea, putting up the headless server, what we might want to do each week, etc
- Alpha approach and what we need / who can work on what. Target date to have something interesting to announce: Late September for 3rd birthday?
- We could call alpha "first re-playable" with the front-end mostly stable and do the remaining back-end work in a beta milestone (meaning when that is finished we're "Beta")
- This could touch on what game mode(s) we want to push to truly playable over the summer, so we have something by September to highlight
- World look - slopes ? Would it help set us apart or look funny? How hard to implement? Should we consider any tweaks to apparent sizing and such in an attempt to look more novel by default? Game modes of course could pick themselves
- Forum structure and thread prefixes - modules vs concepts, modders vs contributors, etc
- Also leads into design questions, game modes, and "optional" / "supporting" dependencies
- Incubators for engine features and other MovingBlocks repos, new Module forum with one thread per module (could even automate / auto-link) ? Game mode module thread could be for "global" discussion for that series, or could use art or dev portal threads.
- Each thread should match a wiki page (engine doc) or module repo ?
- Start using the Suggestions forum more, specifically for ideas that aren't ready for an incubator or module thread yet (or spans multiple)
- Sponsorships and code bounties. Listings friends of the project for traffic trade or server sponsorship (recent news on this). Concerns / limitations ?
- Maybe we could use https://freedomsponsors.org for code bounties - that way we can set bounties ourselves with community funds and others can add bounties independently
- There is also Patreon - noticed it a few times, most recently with libGDX using it: http://www.patreon.com/libgdx - is more of an on-going support thing for paying server costs and such
- Should we do a tiny Kickstarter for "swag" ? Shirts, posters, mugs, Gooeys, etc. Maybe we could set a stretch goal at 10k for the OUYA mega-code bounty (they'll match 10k if you launch on OUYA and no other consoles - easy limitation for us, but question if we could find somebody who would do it. With 10k to offer that might help though!)
- Could relate to future forum donor rank system and tier-based rewards (when we actually have something to reward people with - like a Steam version key?) - same could be used to reward donors (although split between one-time donations and monthly patron-type donations?)
- I wouldn't mind running this just for the experience. Likely the goal would be a grand total of $500 or so just to get discounts on custom shirts or something
The money-related topics are more just to offer them in case somebody wants to throw money at us. We still don't actually have anything to seriously spend money on, nor any serious income, or plans to push for change.
A small-time sponsor did contact me lately wanting to help pay our server costs in return for a link to a player community, which is what made me want to run over the options again. If we get more than needed to pay the server it would be neat to put code bounties on something. Or just support random people tossing bounties on issues they care to see done sooner.
The OUYA thing is detailed on http://freethegamesfund.com - in short it is a contest running till August. I'm not even sure if stretch goals count or if you have to set your primary campaign target at 10k+. Severely doubt we could get anywhere near there anyway, but hey, crazy things happen. I'd volunteer to do all the organizing / legal / finance stuff.
