Weekly Update: 08/15/2011 - 08/19/2011

ID:117450
 
Aug 20 2011, 10:05 am (Edited on Aug 23 2011, 4:47 am)

Resource Center V4.2.23



STATUS REPORT

Total Unique Users: 2186
Total New Users Since Last Update: 61
Total User Visits Since Last Update: 254

Total Bonuses Given: 95665
Total Bonuses Given Since Last Update: 3050

Total Asset Submissions: 194
Total Approved Asset Submissions: 105
Total Asset Submissions Since Last Update: 1

Total User Earnings: $373
Total User Earnings Since Last Update: $2

Total Withdraw Amount: $187
Total Withdraw Amount Since Last Update: $11

Total User Silver: 241833

Rankings:
Command Sergeant Major: 1 - (Active Payout Earnings: 21112)
Sergeant Major: 1 - (Active Payout Earnings: 935)
Sergeant First Class: 1 - (Active Payout Earnings: 2105)
Corporal: 1 - (Active Payout Earnings: 331)
Private First Class: 2 - (Active Payout Earnings: 2187)
Private: 215 - (Active Payout Earnings: 8157)
Recruit: 885 - (Active Payout Earnings: 4346.3)

Total Contributors: 69

Last Week:

Poplava Collaboration Project:

- Posted the following ad in the BYOND classified section. As soon as I post this, I'll be working on answering all the questions and responding to feedback. After-which, I will dive into organizing the first project and see how far we can take this.

Project Name:
Poplava Development Team

Description:
Poplava is looking for a team of developers to work on many games.

Project Goal:
The goal is to develop an onslaught of games which are specifically designed to generate revenue.

Skills Needed:
Core Developers:
- Proven game developers or anyone that has been trying for years and has a healthy backlog of unfinished games.

Interface Designers:
- Can demonstrate previous works with spiffy interfaces.

Game Designers:
- Anyone with a good idea.
- If you submit an accepted game design or prototype, you will lock in a percentage of any earnings. The more detailed the design document, the greater you investment will be.
- If you submit a simple one pager and it gets accepted and built, you would get an appropriate cut.

Artists:
- Give us a try. Our projects will have monthly releases so people can bounce around as needed.

Project Managers:
- If you think you have the energy to manage people, projects, tasks, and code over the course of a month or so, we can give you a try. Having previous development experience is an absolute must and you will undergo a more thorough review process. The first thing a project manager will most likely do is find a project and start writing a ton of documentation for several weeks.

Other:
- If you have other skills, let us know what those are and we'll see if we can find some projects for you to work on.

Compensation:
- When any Poplava game earns the entire development team earns based on their rank. Rank is determined by your contributions. It's a really interesting system that provides a great deal of flexibility and encourages team work. The Resource Center already handles the distribution of earnings and will be used for this project.
- Poplava is a non-profit organization.
- The owner of Poplava (tsfreaks) is treated just like any other contributor and must work for his share.
- The Resource Center has been online since 2010 and has proven to be a trustworthy resource for users and contributors alike. Hopefully, that little bit of reputation can help ease some concerns with trust which can be one of the toughest barriers to get past.

Team Members (Optional):
- All Resource Center contributors.
- Going forward, I would hope that we can be respectfully known as "The Poplava Development Team".

Resources:
- All contributor resources which are volunteered will be available to all Poplava projects. As an example, all tsfreaks resources will be made freely available to all active projects.

Previous Work (Optional):
The following projects were written by tsfreaks. Some of which have yet to be released and there are many more years worth of examples and prototypes I will be throwing into the mix. The hexagon based strategy game that most of you have seen is slated as one of the possible projects.
- Resource Center
- HEXWAR
- MRTS
- Cathedral
- Coloropoly
- HuckDunt
- Tower Defense: Clone Wars
- Dungeons of Dueragnome

Getting Involved:
- As a contributor, you have the freedom to work on a project, skip it, or even just tweak it a little. As we get started, there will be some ramp up time as projects get put together and design docs get created. My hope is that a few of you are more interested in succeeding at something vs continuing to toil on the perfectly impossible game.

tsfreaks is spear heading the first project with Snipe Fest which is ready to start. This project needs two devs and optionally an artist to get us through the V1 features.
- One dev will be focused on primarily the sniping functionality.
- Second dev will be focused on interface items such as chat, lobby, and in-game store framework.
- If we get an artist, they will have avatars and a map to work on.
- PM (tsfreaks) will organize efforts, field spec questions, update documentation, and crank away on the V2 spec. He will also provide the starting interface and project.

Here you can see the level of organization and forethought that will go into our projects.


- Each of those documents is loaded with content. In another folder on the document share, there is more documentation about how the whole system works including information on workflow, compensation, and etc.

- As a general practice, all projects will be designed to release once a month. We are hoping that contributors will be able to maintain solid energy levels for monthly releases. By working together and sharing in the rewards, I think we will be able to achieve a great deal.

More information:
If your interested in learning more, please go here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/ 1V_bMgbbpVEcTpVYfmxtMGlFyBo_FvmnelY99XnblCxk/edit?hl=en_US

We can be reached via the Resource Centers messaging system or by email which is [email protected].


Poplava Resource Center:

- A few people have gotten themselves banned over the last couple of months for screwing around with certain fields. Don't do it because auto ban and grossly detailed logging is in full effect and if you submit certain things, your just done. I'm in no hurry to unban people either. You've been warned.

Poplava Challenge #1:

- A success in terms of completing it on time and as intended but the turn out wasn't such a great success. A lot of people started and then just faded toward the end. I would consider holding these often if I knew that people were going to actually participate. Anyone have suggestions on how to increase our participation?


This Week:

Poplava Collaboration Project:

- Respond to all the questions and feedback.
- Update the documentation
- Kick start the Snipe Fest project
- Work with potential Project Managers and see if we can work out a solid brain storming method to hash out new project ideas. A couple of you expressed interest in doing this, please drive things from your end to help move this thing along. I'm expecting some google chat conversations to take place.

Resource Center:

- I've racked up a number of tasks over the last couple of weeks that I am going to tackle.
- I'm also going start implementing the changes for the Collaboration Projects.
- If I can get a second dev for the starter project, that will free up time for making those changes as well as managing the entire effort. That's where I should really spend the most time.

Poplava Challenge #1:

- Dish out the prizes and close it out.
- Solicit feedback and suggestions for another one.

Connect: Resource Center
More: Info
Aug 20 2011, 3:31 pm
Regarding the challenge, I think you should continue to create challenges, in my opinion people will join if you continue with more challenges. Often people won't notice a contest right away, and they'll join late (as in my case), so they won't be able to finish in time, or they'll decide to pass on the contest. But as people join and try to finish their game, they'll get to know how much work has to be done in that time span, allowing them to finish in time for future challenges.

Also, if you keep similar rules, where someone can use his past work, people from the last challenge will likely rejoin and finish their project. There's also the fact of this challenge having low entries, people may think future challenges may be easy to enter, and will more likely enter the next challenge.

A lot of contests on Byond end after the first contest, I think that's one of the big reasons for so many failed contests.

If we could get contests a front page view, it would really help things, but I guess that aspect is out of our hands.
Aug 20 2011, 3:35 pm
I think the problem with the contest was that it was simply too long. People see that they have a ton of time, pick a complex concept and either get burnt out halfway through or procrastinate. For future contests, I'd say making them last one to two weeks. Also, make the prize more visible. I have a feeling some might have skimmed through the post, skipped over the prizes, and were not interested.
Aug 20 2011, 5:05 pm
And the hexagon theme. I'm glad it was made optional, but I still burned myself out halfway through, definitely.
Aug 20 2011, 5:59 pm
Calus CoRPS wrote:
I think the problem with the contest was that it was simply too long.

^^^^ This. Cause also if you think about it, amateur programmers will not enter a contest if they see someone with good skills in it. Why? "Bro, we ain't gonna win... -insert dude like forum_account- is in it". But if you give Forum_Account a week or two, and someone like me a week or two, he's probably still gonna win but I will have a chance.

Also it would be neat if the format was different. All the contests are "start here, do stuff until deadline, hit deadline, who wins". It would be cool if you had a way for motivation. Like for example here's an idea


-TOURNAMENT CONTEST
Give people a weeks notice that you are doing a tournament contest, and have people confirm they are going to be in it. Don't release the theme yet. Now, once you have them in it, pair everyone up against someone in bracket format, give them x amount of days to start on their project, (example, 4-5) and then on the end day they have to have their project in. Now whomever is better gets to go on, and the loser gets put in a loser bracket (where if they lose here, they are out of tournament), so they still have a chance to get a prize and they don't feel their project was for nothing. So basically, people are battling each other to keep making there games, to advance to the final round. People won't have to release their games to anyone or anything, just to you. So no one knows how good anybody's project is and doesn't drop out automatically. No shows get kicked, and it would be cool if even if I lost, I still get a tiny reward, so I feel like it wasn't for nothing. 500-1000 Resource points per whatever level of the bracket I'm on maybe? Just sayin' of course.
-

Whatcha think about that?
Aug 20 2011, 6:08 pm
Calus CoRPS wrote:
I think the problem with the contest was that it was simply too long.

This is a good point. 2 months is a long time to stay focused on one project.
Aug 20 2011, 6:25 pm
Ganing wrote:
-TOURNAMENT CONTEST
Give people a weeks notice that you are doing a tournament contest, and have people confirm they are going to be in it. Don't release the theme yet. Now, once you have them in it, pair everyone up against someone in bracket format, give them x amount of days to start on their project, (example, 4-5) and then on the end day they have to have their project in. Now whomever is better gets to go on, and the loser gets put in a loser bracket (where if they lose here, they are out of tournament), so they still have a chance to get a prize and they don't feel their project was for nothing. So basically, people are battling each other to keep making there games, to advance to the final round. People won't have to release their games to anyone or anything, just to you. So no one knows how good anybody's project is and doesn't drop out automatically. No shows get kicked, and it would be cool if even if I lost, I still get a tiny reward, so I feel like it wasn't for nothing. 500-1000 Resource points per whatever level of the bracket I'm on maybe? Just sayin' of course.
-

Whatcha think about that?

That's a really neat idea. Might be a problem for the reviewers if there are a lot of submissions to vote on. I like the idea of developers being rewarded as they go to help encourage them. I also like that they are challenging one other entry. One variation could be a sort of stack ranking elimination process where the person on the bottom of the list gets dropped each week. The farther you go the higher your reward when you do finally get dropped. Either way, a fun twist for sure.

Aug 20 2011, 6:29 pm
PopLava wrote:
One variation could be a sort of stack ranking elimination process where the person on the bottom of the list gets dropped each week. The farther you go the higher your reward when you do finally get dropped. Either way, a fun twist for sure.

Now that would be a ton of fun!
Aug 21 2011, 10:35 am
sweet hex and hella gon had no ilegal uses of other peoples stuff im preety sure we were allowed to use pixel movement libary.
im gonna make a video about this im mad and nobody messes with a laserdog and gets away

I rightfully disvresed 3rd place and u know it poplava u can try to hide that fact but u just kept me from third for your own entertainment hahaha.
i desrved 3rd and u took that away from me
Aug 21 2011, 5:41 pm
@Laserdog:
I made it very clear in the previous post that you are to contact me directly if you have any questions regarding the disqualifications. Nothing has changed.
Aug 23 2011, 4:53 am
A direct link to the about document which explains how collaboration system works for anyone interested.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/ 1V_bMgbbpVEcTpVYfmxtMGlFyBo_FvmnelY99XnblCxk/edit?hl=en_US