I have been hanging and buzzing around for a while not having a forum account until today. It needs to be said this game is by and far brilliant, and truly an example of a great labor of love. I have never played a game that felt more alive, and that the feedback for was near instant. The whole community too, I’ve learned more about coding and making a game from seeing it done with this game. I just think everyone here needs to hear it from an outsider.
Also if someone sets up a way I can donate monthly, like a dollar or two a month I would be more than up for that. I feel like that would be a great way for people to also contribute.
For now you could help us by setting aside those few dollars every month. Eventually we should have a donation link up so that people can donate more to extend the period of time we get to hire GalenEvil for him and then you can put everything you’ve saved up so far into the pool and help! Other then that the best way you can help out the project is to be active on the forums and github in pointing out bugs. Most of us devs spend far more time messing around with the internals of the game then actually playing it, so it’s possible for us to miss bugs. You can also give ideas or put your thoughts in on othr peoples’, the more ideas are out there the better the game will become in the end.
I want to express my thanks for everyone involved in this game too, I found it randomly on a forum about rogue-like I was instantly hooked :>
Regarding the donate option, have you guys considered using flattr.com ? Basically it’s a micro-transaction service that let’s the users donate to various projects/creators with their chosen fund, the fund will then be divided between projects that the user “flatr-ed”.
does anyone know of any other open source games that have this many people working on it? you could look at the all the Angband and Nethack variants, but those are variants not lots of people working on the same core game.
I have a project BTC address, but I don’t have it on me right now, I’ll try and rememeber to post it later, and also get GlyphGryph to put it on the main page.
We should probably set up a project flattr (and governance and shit, ugh).
I think I’m going to make a stickied donations thread, and anyone can put up info where they personally can have stuff donated to them. Flattr, BTC, paypal, whatever. (I do mean anyone, everything from code to tilesets to ideas for the game, it’s up to the donor to decide what is significant to them)
As for develper community size, we’re really far up there, I think we might be the biggest roguelike if you measure in development velocity and number of current contributors, and we might be in the top 20 or so of open source game projects by the same measure. There are some MUCH larger open source game projects though. This is mostly where I get my info on that kind of thing: https://www.ohloh.net/p/cataclysm-dda For example looking at DCSS, https://www.ohloh.net/p/stonesoup their codebase is way bigger than ours, they have slightly fewer contributors and fewer commits per month, but they’ve been at it a lot longer as a community project. Also the numbers are close enough that it makes it really hard to tell, their average commit might be bigger than our average commit, or their average contributor might put more work in on average, which would mean they’re changing faster, so it’s kind of hard to tell, of course we might have more and larger commits and more and more dedicated devs, it’s really hard to tell.
Long time lurker on this forum, I also wanted to post my appreciation for all the hardwork that the devs have been doing. Once the donation system is set up I’m going to be sure to donate to this awesome project.
