Would you?!

ID:1989405
 
Nov 27 2015, 11:49 am

Poll: Would you provide your service free to help byond expand game number wise?

Depends on the Developer 10% (2)
Depends on the project 10% (2)
Depends how big the project 10% (2)
I don't trust Byond 'Developers' to do this FREE? Answer is no. 31% (6)
Depends on the Team. 21% (4)
I rather stick my head in the tolite and sing bohemian Rhapsody. 15% (3)

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Would you provide your service free to help byond expand game number wise?
(Before you ask, no I'm not asking for no service, just curious of what developers would do?)

Services can mean funding, sound engineering, Pixeling, programming
Nov 27 2015, 12:38 pm (Edited on Nov 27 2015, 12:54 pm)
You should explain what you mean better, like... What would be the incentive to contribute to the number of games BYOND has showcased?

Can you think of any other pros besides the one I listed?

Pros:
  • BYOND may become more lively and successful. -- a cons if I ever decided to make my own game engine to sell?

Cons:
  • I'd make less money than I normally would, if any.
  • The encounters I've had with moderators in the past upset me.
  • Advertisements and limitations.
  • The time I spent could have been used to benefit me instead.
  • The community would spam me if I ever became popular?
  • Wouldn't be able to put it on a resume.
Nov 27 2015, 12:44 pm
Usually, in a poll like this you would include an outright "Yes" option, FYI. You're implying already that no one would just want to help to the best of their abilities with no strings attached.

Notably, the "no strings attached" bit is exactly what library developers do. I am the latter, inasmuch as I'm even a developer on BYOND anymore, and I enjoy writing libraries than I enjoy making games.
Nov 27 2015, 3:38 pm
Precisely what Popisfizzy said. An outright "yes" option would be nice, however unlike him, I just want to make games, not libraries. I dislike managing the team, and I'd love to have a fellow programmer, if not more, to bounce ideas off and help me when I struggle with motivation.

So, yes. Give me an artist and someone with a good idea and though, preferred but not required, a second programmer, and I'll be off for days doin' w0rk.
Nov 27 2015, 8:22 pm
Since most contributions to games from my end would come from music and sound design, I'd have to say a resounding no. It would have to be a project that I felt passionate about as well, otherwise, simply for "exposure", I'd never dedicate months of my life to scoring a project for free that may or may not ever be released.

There's just too much work that goes into what I do to warrant that. It's also a contributing reason as to why I've never bothered trying to work with any developers here, most are either poor or severely low ball your worth.
Nov 28 2015, 12:23 am
I don't understand the meaning of the word, "Free"
Nov 28 2015, 1:51 am
Travylleb wrote:
Would you provide your service free to help byond expand game number wise?

There's a lot of strange limitations and quirks in the language that I feel need to be looked into before it can ever even be considered mainstream.

One of the factors that prevent BYOND from growing is due to the vast majority of games still being written using older methods. New projects are still not being developed in the webclient. Instead, developers opt to develop in Dream Seeker instead, which hurts the chances of fixing some issues because a lot of UI code has to be maintained. This prevents much needed work on the compiler from being completed, since more priority is assigned to Dream Seeker bugs (which is ok).

On the same note there's only one IDE for BYOND. Dream Maker. And bug reports and feature requests for it are still accepted (which is ok too, they should be accepted if there is no viable alternative).

What I feel needs to happen for BYOND to grow is the following:
  1. More games need to be written with the webclient. The games don't need to be innovative, but if all BYOND games were to use the webclient overnight we'd be able to drop support for Dream Seeker and that would save a LOT of time which can then be spent on the compiler. I'm trying to develop my own project with the webclient with Terminus, but unfortunately I'm not able to spend much time on it at the moment as I'm involved with freelance work (I'm actually hoping to use the money gathered from this to support BYOND by encouraging developers to work on my projects).
  2. Qualified developers should look into developing an IDE of their own to replace Dream Maker. Personally I believe Eclipse should be used as a base and extended with plugins to make it work for BYOND, but I'm a little biased as I use the software myself. The benefit of using Eclipse as a base however is that most of the desired functionality such as Intellisense is already built-in & developers would only need to write the code necessary to push this information to Eclipse. I actually wrote a nice start back in January but no-one seems to be motivated enough to work on the project (myself included to be honest). More exposure for this project would be nice...
  3. More teamwork! A lot of developers portray themselves as "lone wolves" who feel they work best alone. I understand this mentality, but working together can be fun too! You can still develop individual features alone, but by working together you learn from each other and can create better projects.
When I look around I see parts of these things already. SS13 particularly works in teams, though there's no central organisation and you've got all these different branches trying to one-up each other instead of branching from a central repository and working to improve the game as a whole.

Some newer developers are trying to use the new webclient to develop, but so far I haven't seen/heard from their projects yet. But I've also witnessed first-hand that a lot of older developers still find it difficult to use the webclient features.

tl;dr I'd love to see more games appear on the system and enough income for BYOND to grow and improve. And I have no problem giving my support for free if the project/developers/team (all of those factors) are worthy enough.

But your idea would need to make sense (poorly developed DBZ games with "Super Saiyan 14" (SS14) still doesn't make sense to me, though there's canonically "Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan" (SSGSS) now haha, so what do I know?), you'd need to be willing to compromise (if you want "Super Saiyan 14" that's fine by me, but let's first discuss what it adds to the game), you'd need to have a plan to make your project grow (ok so now we have a "Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan 14" but still only regular 5 players... isn't it time to create a growth plan or something?)

Services can mean funding, sound engineering, Pixeling, programming

Oh. Well, I was going to mention that I offer my own hosting service and that I'd have no problem hosting games that are going somewhere. But I guess since that isn't a service I shouldn't make that offer. Ok then. :(
Nov 28 2015, 1:55 am
There's actually already plugins for Eclipse and Sublime Text 2, NullQuery. The more you know!
Nov 28 2015, 1:58 am
In response to Rushnut
Rushnut wrote:
There's actually already plugins for Eclipse and Sublime Text 2, NullQuery. The more you know!

I know, but IIRC Sublime Text costs money and is only a text editor (no map or icon editor available) and the Eclipse plugin I wrote myself and also only contains the code editor/compiler-only. Unless you know of someone else who wrote an Eclipse version...
Nov 28 2015, 2:01 am
I'll have a fish around for the Eclipse plugin, but the Sublime Text 2 free version isn't particularly intrusive. I've been using it a fair amount and maybe once a day when you save it asks you to consider purchasing the full version. It's not like a trial or anything, you have full access, just a simple popup every now and then on saving.

E: Oh! Haha I looked on the Github a few days ago and must have seen your very own entry, didn't check the name! Guess yours is the plugin I was speaking of, nevermind! :P
Nov 28 2015, 2:06 am
;-)

Also here is my obligatory "help wanted" ad for anyone interested in, well, helping out & learning:

http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1989776
Nov 28 2015, 4:30 am
That hurt me :[ right here </3
Nov 29 2015, 4:05 am
In response to NullQuery
This does remind me that I was meant to ... you know, actually carry on with that a bit.
Nov 29 2015, 6:35 am
Actually after I finished my 2nd game I made a blog post offering to make entire games for people for like $40 or something. I had two or three modular projects set up based on the ideas I thought I was going to get, and I'd take the ideas people wanted me to create for them and find ways to make them work within my skill level.

Now, considering how much work goes into making a game, you can pretty much call $40 for a completed project next to free. Most people will charge you triple that just for some art alone. Despite me having 2 projects finished and offering to make games dirt cheap for people, I got only one response which was from, iirc, Schnitzelnagler ( or however you spelled his name ) in which he was telling me to halve my already ridiculously low price and then "maybe he'd consider employing me". It was after investing time into my own projects as well as trying to help other people make new creative things on this site and watching it all amount to nothing because people just wanted to blog about CSS and whatever the latest drama was that I concluded that the average IQ of the users on this site was dangerously low to the point that I was wasting my time trying to be productive here.

So no, I would not work for people for free on this site. I wouldn't even work for people if they were paying me on this site. I want nothing more than to just spectate at this point. You can't help people that aren't even willing to help themselves.

So if NullQuery is looking for a reason as to why most of the people who get anything done on this site are "lone wolves", he needn't look farther than this post here.
Nov 30 2015, 10:08 am
am one man army ;)