ID:97807
 
I believe in personal responsibility. If you want something to happen, do it yourself. If you do nothing but wait and rely on others, you discard your power and potential.
If complaining and criticizing things fixed anything, there would be a lot more success in the world, BYOND would be perfect, Firefly would be renewed for more seasons and the government would stop taking your money.
If by chance criticism, protests and your everyday complaining actually gets something done, it probably didn't inspire those doing the changing.

Before I go further into a self-improvement lecture, I'll get to the point. If you're here, you believe there is some value in BYOND. If someone is complaining about BYOND, they probably care.
A certain member of the community who makes a lot of controversial statements is a good example. They are still here, they continue to make good games. At some level they have some value for BYOND or at least what it allows them to do.

I am not a good developer, the projects I've published are poor and unpolished. I can do better and I intend to do better.


Potential Problems

Lack of resources
Often developers have to reinvent the wheel each project. Yes, they could reuse things from previous projects but often their skill has improved, making previous code undesirable to work with.
There are some treasures among the BYOND demos and libraries, but most are buried in the outdated, buggy and less useful ones. The snippits database is great but few probably know of it's existence.

Developers are often the entire team
Programming, art, map design, story writing, math, puzzle design, system balancing and on and on. Developers often fill many roles, it's difficult to be proficient in them all.
We can't all be english and math majors. Most have more talent in certain areas than others.

Forums suck
Sorry. While it can be a valuable tool usually it's not. Scouring forums for a random piece of information that may be outdated is frustrating. Waiting for a response is fine except when it's something common that should be well documented.
Searching can be a chore; hard to predict words others have used or worst of all replies are just "It's probably an infinite loop." or "Use the search feature".

Lack of debugging tools
This is something the BYOND software lacks, but outside the scope of this post. Not being able to monitor various things can be a hassle. Difficult to identify leaks.


A Possible Solution

A group of talented vounteers who have various skills in game development such as: programming, design, testing ability, art, sound, english, stat balancing, and various other skills.
Just people willing to give a little of their time to help out developers with their games. Making them better and therefore making the quality of games on BYOND one step higher.
The groups sole purpose is to improve BYOND and the quality of it's games. The method of doing so can vary, from improving libraries, giving developers advice, donating art etc.

One of the main purposes would be to maintain a wiki. This would be the resource for developers, serving as a starting point and an information resource. Useful libraries and links to art resources, hosting services, and other good stuff.

Another way could be a community upgrade project, a game could be nominated and then a joint effort begins with the developer to improve the game quality.
The author would work together with the group creating ideas and suggestions, perhaps upgrading the art or balancing gameplay. Bringing the game up to a higher standard.

Group members could take it upon themselves to create a list of simple improvements and submit it to a developer. Spelling, grammar, presentation issues, and so on.

Possibly the most important role would be upgrading and maintaining libraries. A developer may submit a good library to the group, if accepted the group would then discuss improvements(probably using the wiki) and features, fix bugs, comment using group guidlines and finally document and release.
Of course libraries could be requested.


I'd like to hear your thoughts and ideas. Unfortunately I could not run such a thing, but I would be willing to lend my support.
Damn I should have done something like this for BYOND Journalism, good topic. However I think what would make BYOND better is not only the obvious part, development and putting out nice games to show people that BYOND is a productive site. But I also think that what could make BYOND better is something like BYOND Journalism, a guild dedicated to letting the community know what is going on in the BYOND Development world, not everyone has a membership or time to post their info on their blog, so BYOND Journalism is trying to get there and tell people what's being planned for BYOND, or what's going on with the latest update to your game. And when we start getting reviews out, this will help show the community a glimpse of what a game is about or has before you try it.
I have only noticed BYOND Journalism in the last few days, but I'm impressed with what I've seen so far.

I absolutely agree with your statements, development is only one side of the die.

I'm happy to see someone with high standards is doing something like this.
The Byond Developer Justice league.

There was another guy recently who wanted to do some kind of collaborative Byond project.
Having more debug tools without having to resort to writing your own debug code would be very welcome. Even having access to the world profiler while client.control_freak is set is a good step.

A wiki was attempted before and, while good intentioned from the start, didn't pan out in the face of various website changes over the years. It kind of stagnated without support and constant attention in the face of 'vandals'.

One of the things I don't like about the libraries/demos section is that various items aren't categorized. You're given a giant listing of items and you need to use the search function to find what you're looking for. But who's to say that the search is actually returning all relevant items? Though, on the flip side people could say that if you had categories maybe certain resources don't fit one of them. Much like the page you get when you go to Developers->Articles, the libraries/demos should have a nice colorful categorical listing. That doesn't help old, outdated resources, but at the very least it would give more focused groupings.
BYOND is perfectly capable of making good games if you work at it and know what you're doing for the most part. I'm trying to prove that myself and will very soon, and I hope others will join me. Just making good games is one thing, but you also mentioned upgrading and maintaining libraries. That's also a biggie, something I could work on a bit. That's how they get lost in the listings. You make a lib and leave it there without ever announcing it or saying you've improved it.
I didn't mean to insinuate BYOND isn't capable, quite the opposite. I just believe a lot of developers, myself included, could benefit greatly from a little help now and then.

There have been many neat demos and experiments people have shown, but never have had the motivation or time to polish and release.

I believe it's also difficult for one person to maintain a library, unlike a game where you see things come to life and get player feedback, libraries are usually release and forget.

A chat library or a admin/GM library would be good examples. Neither is too hard to make, but both can drain a developers time with bugs or adding features. Time better spent on actual mechanics. s_admin was nice but could use some updating.

Went a bit off track with the response, sorry.
The bwiki could have been better, it was rather difficult to use. I feel the recent wiki standards make them more comfortable to use.

If anything it would make a good place to centralize various golden information that is announced on the forums. It's difficult finding it again.

Developers could maintain a page for their games, covering information not suitable for the hub.

However, BYOND has grown a lot since the bwiki. As a semi-official guild attached thing it just may work.
I think more people should be developing open-source projects. Your code probably isn't worth being precious about, and while you probably won't get many contributions, being open-source forces you to think about things like packaging and distribution, and if you do get contributions it's a bonus.

Finally, people can get an idea of how DM code works.
Feel free to modify the existing Bwicki2 code to do what you need. http://byond.com/hub/Nadrew/Bwicki2 -- it's kind of a web of insanity though, you've been warned.
what does Bwicki2 do for instance?
I personally think we would have much better games (Or at least developers working towards that) if the way DM was taught could be changed.

Ill admit, the BlueBook..Is, Uh.. Confusing at times. Its like when I open a mathematics text book. They give me some crazy formula. What it does, etc. Then teach me how to use it.

See what happens there though? I dont "learn" anything. I memorize how to use something. When reading the bluebook, it sorta teaches in that way. How to use something in one instance, and from a couple of examples you are expected to understand its full capabilities.

So, changing how it is taught would be very useful. Another thing, would be searching for useful resources, information, etc. I always get a giant poorly categorized list. Ill be honest, it makes me unsure about learning.

Why? Its like receiving a textbook 6 years old. Unless you did not care for knowledge, you might be worried if the information in there is up-to-date.

Those are my two problems. Well, I would like to see a helpful community. Some individuals..seem to "scare" people off >.>

With that, Id like to give an example of what I mean by teaching. My Professor used Plato's Theory of the Forms to explain how the "Parent-type" works in Java. The Superclass, and all that biz. With recursion, arrays, etc - he used plenty of examples which were similar.