Good morning . I have something to say and hope I can do it in some way giving some meaning. I want to expand some thoughts about ways for moving us towards better and bigger free game projects. Please bare with some unfinished and rough thoughts. You are welcome to expand or reshape.
First about the present scene of free games:
a) We have a lot of game projects.
b) Most of the projects are small scale.
c) It is hard to contribute in any project
What I want to do is to change c, and let it be totally easy to contribute to free game projects. If we get lot more creators involved we will probably also change point b. We should see more big scale free game projects.
How do I suggest making it easy for creators to contribute in free game projects?
My idea to do this is to meet the possible creators where they are and invite them to do random tasks in their field, perhaps within the most active free game projects.
Different kinds of creators will be at their different places. A graphics creator will perhaps be at Blender or Gimp or Mypaint. An audio creator will perhaps be at Ardour or Audacity. A written text narrative creator will maybe be at Libreoffice. A code creator will perhaps be vim or something.
All groups of creators could get invitation in their most used crative application tools to contribute in the most active projects. Maybe in Blender the creator hit the «new task» button and the program finds something to do. Perhaps «make a 3d model of a sword for Erik the viking king for the the awesome game Erik» (BTW I think Blender are working on a cloud based asset management system at the time).
I think lot of people would like to contribute if they got the tasks presented in the applications they use. Then I think we could have really rapid and huge developments in free games.
What do we need?
We need an application for game design, where designers can list and describe what they need.
The items in the list must have an online place for asset storage.
Then we need hooks in the different applications..
We need probably lot of work on this and many details I do not see at the moment.
…...
Well, now my writing spirit is over for this day. I hope you got a rough idea.