Progress?

[charlie]

[amuzen]

Yep, still working on it and doing more or less steady progress. The code is in a good enough shape for now, I think, but content creation is lagging behind really badly. The lack of any decent content basically means that I don't have anything to release or show off in the blog. Or maybe there was some good enough stuff but I just didn't feel like polishing everything for a release or writing about it. Nah, that could never be...

Well, in any case, it shouldn't take long until I got something to show off for real. I have been working on quest writing a bit already and it's looking pretty promising, but it takes time when you lack the experience and have to do everything yourself. Coming up with good ideas for quests and modeling the characters and objects are giving me some trouble, but I'm learning so hopefully something good will come out of it.

[charlie]

Release early, release often though. That way you are more likely to attract contributors. Also keep an eye on opengameart.org for potential content.

I'm sure I've given you my opinion on this many times - implement basic quests, mini-games, that serve a development purpose, and release each time. That way you build up a bit of gameplay, even if it's not the wonderful cohesive world you are aiming for, and it gives people a reason to check it out and play it and perhaps contribute.

[amuzen]

I agree that ideally one should release much more frequently than I do. Releasing is a lot of effort for an army of one that works on a complex project, though. The necessary testing, polishing, bug fixing, compiling, packaging, and publicity stuff tends to take roughly a week from me so a short release cycle could eat up a lot of time. I also find most of the tasks related to releasing incredibly dull so I tend to want something that really is worth the pain. Considering the circumstances, I doubt I'd be able to reduce the release time below six months without the urge to stab kittens rising dangerously high.

If there were more developers, things would be different. It doesn't look like anyone is going to help until the game has at least some content and gameplay to inspire them, though. Looking dead doesn't help, of course, but the game being completely uninteresting for the time being is the real reason why no one is interested, I think. Adding a few simple quests and monsters and polishing the rest of the stuff I have been working on should be enough for the next release. I'll probably bump the version number to 0.1 then since there are quite a few important improvements.

[charlie]

You suffer from being a perfectionist. A release need not be perfect. It can have bugs, it can be source-only, it can be done without publicity.

There's a community who follows these projects. They'll handle publicity.

If you are attracting attention, they'll test it and catch the bugs.

If you have users who like your project, they'll package it.

[amuzen]

Hmm, a good point, and I definitely wouldn't complain if I could drop the majority of the boring release tasks.

It's worth a shot, I think. Source only releases would definitely take far less time to create, and the binary packages don't seem to be that popular after all. Just dumping the stuff into a tarball and limiting testing to compiling and running it would take less than a day. A faster release cycle would be feasible with such a setup. Whether anyone will bother with the bugs and packaging is another matter then, but I guess that it would be a good trade-off even if they didn't.

[KroArtem]

well, speaking about installing Lips Of Suna from sources, I don't really understand how to install it. Waf isn't in ubuntu repositories, so I should download waf from official site, compile it first, then compile Lips OF Suna.. It is just a bit boring, don't you think so?

[amuzen]

well, speaking about installing Lips Of Suna from sources, I don't really understand how to install it. Waf isn't in ubuntu repositories, so I should download waf from official site, compile it first, then compile Lips OF Suna.. It is just a bit boring, don't you think so?

Yeah, they removed it from the repositories but I started bundling it to the source code so that you don't need to download it separately. After pulling the code repository with Git, you should find the Waf script from the top level directory. Of course, I forgot to update the compilation instructions when I did the changes so it's no wonder you got stuck.

Though, even with Waf bundled, compiling the game is far from a pleasure. Bullet, Grapple, and Squish aren't in the Ubuntu repositories so you need to install those from source. Once you got the dependencies and the game compiled, you need to pull the data files from the data repository and, uhh, I really need to do something about the data repository now since compiling the data files has become so complicated.

Well, sorting out the data file mess isn't too hard so I'll give it a try in a bit. I have also been thinking of setting up a PPA for the dependencies, and perhaps the game itself as well, but I never got around learning how to do it. I'd really appreciate if someone could provide an example on it or, better yet, create the source debs for the dependencies.