I think it would be cool if we had a community project.
What are your opinions on this?
I would suggest instead of a community project, which is pretty hard to manage usually, organise a competition to make a game of a give genre. For instance, for simplicity it could be clone of mario, or battle city or some tower defence. In other words something reasonably doable. The submissions will help the comunity a lot eventually.
P.S. this is real experience from some game forum in my country.
P.P.S. I saw several game engine communities who tried to make a community project. It never worked out. At least it was no longer community, just one or two guys only pulled it.
competitions would make much more sense - come up with feature x or y in one month, make it public and the winner gets a prize.
What about a 48h game compo every saturday… The game must be small and simple and every time there’s a different theme, ie. retro side scroller shooter . And users get 1 week to vote…
easier said that done lol
Why not start friday, end monday??
nice idea dude!
We should do something like this, with a bit more community backing, it might work 
I think a good concept for a larger competition would be something close to Tigsource’s Assemblee.
Artists create art for a duration (1 week, 1 month, doesn’t matter just some set time) They post that to a particular place, all assets made are public domain.
Then Programmers make mechanics using those art assets for the same duration the artists had to make the art. They can’t use new assets but they can think up any mechanics they want to perform with those assets. In the final product of each entry both programmers and contributing artists are creditted for each entry.
If we make the Scripts public domain as well, it would help build the Wiki with good generic resources and functionality, as well as providing a mass amount of open source assets to pass around as well.
Hey, that sounds sexy! I was just thinking about it’s kind of an big obstacle to come up with a game without any art. I was picturing many games made of boxes and spheres hehe… It’d be plain awesome to have a public domain art, even if it’s really simple art and quickly done stuff, at least so coders have something to work with, and as it gets bigger coders get more stuff to work with for every compo…
This would need some sort of website to work out… somewhere you can upload/download art/games for every compo, and then be able to vote… I don’t know how to code a website,though, not sure how complex that’d be to make
why not make something like a dropbox account and everyone who takes part gets to know the password:)
The problem is that most people probably won’t just give away their 3d models since there’s a lot that goes into that - design, geo, sculpts, textures, etc., it’s a ton, a ton of work. On top of that, if people wouldn’t stick to the same art direction, you’d just get a mish mash of assets that completely doesn’t work if you put it next to one another.
The TigSource stuff mostly is simpler 2d stuff that people can do on the side if they spend a couple of hours here and there.
why not 2D then??
How about for art assets have it to where there is a contest to see who can make the best ____ genre specific model and those who win will be included in the community project.
So someone can make some sci fi weapons and someone else can make some swords etc.
What if instead of making a tightly managed project everyone would make one fully completed scene of the game. They could come up with their own gameplay for maybe about 5 minutes following only some general guidelines and maybe a common character. The showcase is full of small one-scene game prototypes ( many of which were abandoned) so I think something of that scale could be realistic for an induvidual developer. In the end the completed screnes would be combined built and loaded in random order every time the game is played. I think the end result would certainly be very strange!
There are already a handful of community projects. “The Generals” RTS project comes to mind.
I will side with the skeptics on this one. It will either fall apart due to:
- competing vision
- lack of contribution
- poor control of the project
Otherwise, it would end up being a 2-man project that many in the community feel they partly own due to trivial contributions which were discarded by the dedicated team that happens to be much smaller than the community at-large.
liek, a collab?
I like the mini comp idea. or use mini comps to make a collab.
a 48 hour competition (or something with a very small time frame like that) would be nice. I would definitely participate in this if it happens. The problem with community projects is that they are usually way too ambitious, require constant effort over many months and sometimes years. It is virtually impossible to find people willing to commit that much time… But 2 days, no problem It would be fun!
Sorry for the long post!
I have no idea how or if this is of any interest or relevance, but I wonder if the ‘Wikitecture’ concept might be useful here. We developed this experimental process a few years ago (calling our community ‘Studio Wikitecture,’ http://www.studiowikitecture.wordpress.com
The basic idea is to apply open, public participation - like you see in open source software development, or Wikipedia - but applied toward encouraging a more collaborative, open, public architectural design process.
Obviously a lot of this might not translate well into Unity - but we developed a ‘Wiki Tree’ tool in Second Life, which enables contributors to submit, retrieve, edit, refine and vote on various design ideas. Sort of like a Wiki in 3D. When a contributor submits a design, the Wiki Tree automatically creates a ‘leaf’ on the tree, which then retrieves that design whenever that leaf was clicked on. That design can then be modified and re-saved back into the Wiki Tree as a ‘branch’ off the original idea. The Wiki Tree also automatically creates a cell on an external website for each design contributed, where descriptions can be added, screenshots uploaded, votes cast, discussions take place, etc.
To divide up credit or compensation at the end, we asked everyone who participated to use the ‘Contribution Assessment System’ to help determine how to divide credit and/or compensation, which worked quite well.
Wikitecture is still an ongoing experiment, but we were able to complete several successful projects, and even won an international architecture competition - through work contributed by anyone who wanted to join in. ( http://bit.ly/4E9YfG )
I mention this only because I think the idea of a collaborative project is awesome - something I think about developing with Unity quite often, and would love to see something like this come to life. I’ve seen firsthand how exciting it is to see a collaborative idea evolve by contributions and suggestions from all around the world - and I wondered if some elements of the overall Wikitecture process itself might be a useful precedent. I noticed others mentioning the idea of voting, and trying to figure out how to store the project’s files, and how to divie up credit or compensation - and thought I would share this just in case some part of it might be useful.
Though it is currently built on SL technology, the Wiki Tree itself has been open sourced under BSD license, and can be found here: Wiki Tree: The 3D Wiki download | SourceForge.net
Here’s an image of what the total website looked like after a project was completed:
(I can imagine something like this working for Unity - with the screenshots linked to web-player builds of that design)
Here is a short video showing a preview of how the Wikitecture process works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amCi90zH3VI