Coders -- what can we do for you?
Where OGA 1.0 is an archive of free, legal art for open source game projects, OGA 2.0 will be a platform that brings together coders, designers, and artists to make awesome games. Now, unlike with art, it doesn't necessarily make sense for us to archive code. There are plenty of other free code archiving and versions services out there (such as SourceForge and Github) that do it better than we ever could.
So, what can we do? I've got some ideas to toss out here, but I really just want to get the discussion started. If you're a coder and there's something that you'd like to be able to do with OGA, we'd love to hear from you!
First off, game project pages. These are an extension of the "collections" I've discussed in another thread. Your OGA project page will be able to function as anything from just a collection of art for your project all the way to full web page for your game. I wouldn't necessarily expect large projects to want to host their public webpages on OGA, but if you're running a small project and wanting a place to distribute it and keep in touch with your community, we can help with that.
Your project page will do the following:
- Archive all of the art you're using in your project
- List your main contributors
- Allow you to post art (such as title graphics and UI mockups) that only applies to your project and isn't necessarily useful for other game projects in general
- Allow you to comment on and evolve said art
- Let you keep a searchable to-do list so that artists looking for something to work on can help you at their leisure
- Post comments and keep a timeline of art contributions
- Link to your project's main website (if you have one)
Please note that, while we fully support the development of closed-source games, in keeping with our site's mission (and making sure that every single thing we archive is safe for inclusion in Open Source software), we can only host project pages for games that are released under a Debian-approved (free as in speech) license.
As always, if you have any thoughts on how we could do more, please chime in and let us know!
Bart
Hello, Stumbled across here from a coder site and thought i'd throw in my two cents!
Personally, unifying all members of a team into one resource pool would be a good start, alongside showing how frequently the project is updated as to avoid wasting time with dead ideas. You could have two different page types - One to display the game to the 'outside' world, and one for wandering artists on the site looking to contribute to a project. Outlining each media file into a giant mosaic would allow people to get an overall feel for the aesthetical direction of the game, and perhaps allow coders/other project members to post a 'We need this!' in the project in hopes to attract attention to fill the need.