Disclaimer: You can consider the initiative still open to new applications even if you’re reading this a long time after posting.
This is most likely the last blog post before the 19.5 community release. But in a way it might be the most important one for the future of the game. Since I started working on Reborn I took the initiative on several occasions to put together the new team, set up some workflows and good practices. This time I’m going a step further because this initiative isn’t targeting just the team but the community as well. Let’s see how this goes.
Okay, here is a little confession. I’m a big fan of open-source software and have a lot of personal experience with both contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. When I look at this community with 3 different games sharing the same engine and how many mods the community made for these games I can’t help but think that the games could be even better if we involve the community and modders more actively.
So today I’m introducing an experiment I proposed to Ame and the team and which we decided to try. No, we aren’t fully going open-source but it’s somewhat close to it. The idea is that we can give the more experienced community members and modders an opportunity to improve the game directly. You can help to fix some annoying bugs, make changes in the base game to make modding easier, and if the dev team likes your idea you can even contribute a new feature.
We have a private Discord server for this purpose. The way to get in is to apply by filling our form. The development team will review your applications and decide who to invite. We decided against having the Discord server public in order to keep the discussions productive and avoid having too many random people discussing things without actually being there to contribute themselves.
How strict we’ll be when selecting who to invite depends a lot on how many applications we’ll get. But there is no need to be shy to send one! It is also alright to send a new application later if your first was denied and your situation changed since then in some relevant way - for instance you learned new skills, started working on a new mod, joined a team which has other members already part of the initiative and so on. We can reconsider.
Next, we have private GitHub repositories for the game and the scripts. Git is a version control system - if you’re not familiar with it, here is a nice introduction video.
You don’t necessarily need to have previous Git experience to contribute. You will only need the basics mentioned in the video and a bit about submodules which we will explain. We can help you learn more if it becomes relevant.
Our motivation is to invite the authors of the large mods who often need to make many changes to the scripts and tend to add new features or fix bugs that should preferably be made in the base game instead. This is also intended to be the place where we give you some support to update your mods to the new engine and give you tips on how to maintain the mods afterwards in order to make future updates easier. And some good practices to have your mod compatible with online features and such.
Challenge runners who often find or hear about a bug and aren’t shy to dig into the code to fix it are also very welcome. This is how Stardust started after all!
But the initiative is by no means limited to these cases. If you just want to try and help make the game better, you can.
Some examples:
- We want to make modding easy and who would know better what’s needed than the modders, right?
- The engine should have Gen 9 battle mechanics implemented for usage by mods even if not by Reborn base game. Rejuvenation or Desolation might also want to add Gen 9 in a future release.
- Gen 8 dynamic speed mechanic. We still don’t have it implemented in the engine even though Rejuvenation and Desolation are using Gen 8.
- Reborn doesn’t have a quest log like Rejuv and Deso. But if the community implements one it could become part of the game.
- Text-to-speech support for blind players doesn’t work for all game screens and features yet. It would really help them to have the rest implemented. We also have other ideas on how to improve their experience.
- Contributing to graphics and other assets. We could use a few spriters to help out with some work. For instance we’d like to update the overworld player sprites and will need some help to create all the variants (running, bike, surf, mine cart, fishing, riding).
- Fixing bugs discovered by yourself, the devs or the community.
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Your own idea which you think might be good for the base game! Even if the feature may not be suitable for all players we might still accept it as a password.
And last but certainly not least, this is also a good opportunity for those who would like to join our team as actual developers. If we’re happy with your contributions, it’s a real possibility.
Of course not every suggested change will actually appear in the main game. Our team will discuss the ideas with you, review the changes and decide if both the idea and the actual implementation are something we want to include.
Application form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfwtMIEZTDqEEdBDHTELuoSawaO2tKPOAP3HAgamS52XgG97w/viewform
FAQ:
> How demanding is the role? How much time do you expect the applicants to dedicate to this project?
You're not applying to become a dev here. There are no big expectations, we do understand ppl are busy and modders already dedicate lot of time to their mods. Occasional contribution is enough. It would be nice to have some regular contributors as well but it doesn't need to be everyone.
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