Our Apps and Games Campaign

[Breakable]

If we wont have access to a large team of full-time developers at our disposal any results would probably be marginal or would take a lot of time to materialize so the ideas need to be extremely simple to produce something.
Even a single full-time developer cannot pull something that of a sort that is done by commercial companies. On the other hand there are some nice INDY/Open source games that although don’t have advanced graphics or music try to compete on originality basis.
Definitely we can’t even pull it off on a INDY level, but if we are able to concentrate our efforts on finding the right (simple/orginal/interesting) idea for a concept, then we might make a start that others would like to capitalize on (open source).
Still to kick start an open source game development community we need at least 1 full time (or at least part time) developer that is fully focused on this idea.

Some inspiration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZUS2h-Yzc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress

Something else to look into are game-jam events, but this will also not produce anything usable in a fast fashion and there is no control over the final result.

[Breakable]

So to summarize, to see a result:
1)Hire (intern) someone
2)Give him an idea, or let him work on suggestions
3)????
4)Results

[Rezwan]

Breakable wrote: If we wont have access to a large team of full-time developers at our disposal any results would probably be marginal or would take a lot of time to materialize so the ideas need to be extremely simple to produce something.

The plan is to get access to, to inspire, to assemble a large team. In the meantime, to encourage simple ideas.

Remember, we’re trying to show people how much there is to do on behalf of fusion, how many jobs there would be to create for the advancement of fusion – how many different ways people can make a difference in the pursuit of fusion.

The point is not for us to supply a product. This is the “showing the need” phase. Showing the space for action and collaboration.

Don’t take it upon yourself to fulfill the need. We’re putting together the company. Assembling the interested. If there isn’t interest, it simply won’t get done.

I suspect there is interest.

[Rezwan]

Also, “intern” isn’t synonymous with slave labor. We’d have to be more established to have interns. Discussion here.

[Breakable]

The point is not for us to supply a product. This is the “showing the need” phase.

Open Source projects usually don’t work that way. I participated in a few Open-Source projects, this is what I saw: the usual approach is that there is a person (or sometimes more) who is dedicated to development (Like for example “Linus Torwalds” for linux) and he is working on his idea more or less full time (Lead Developer). Usually the lead developer releases something working (v0.1 or v1.0). Other people take interest, and then other volunteer developers appear on-and-off, sometimes adding a small change here or there. For a long time of developing a project, volunteer developers might get interested enough to dedicate a considerable time on this project and sometimes even match or even become a lead developers themselves, but this event is quite rare. So finding people who become dedicated to an idea enough to become Lead developers is extremely hard. A lot of sand has to be sifted to find a grain of gold. If there are no Lead Developpers, then the project can wither and die, how it happened with one of the project I followed (“Vega Strike”).
Something to visualize the process:
http://vimeo.com/1093745

EDIT, changed the link as Arch Linux is build by merging non-original code so and Python is original work

[Zara]

Who is running Zynga Games… I would like to have them removed.

[Rezwan]

Hello all,

What do you think of our emerging apps and games campaign?

More importantly, what kind of resources do we need to pull it off? And please don’t say “outsource” or “free volunteer labor” – enough wishful thinking fusion fans! What would a job description be for a program coordinator for such a campaign? What’s the going rate. We’d like to formally pursue this and get it as a line item in our grant proposal.

Of course, that person will then probably come up with a budget for the full campaign. And ultimately it would be partially open source with all the “free” labor to augment it.

[Also, note to early birds, I’m still uploading/formatting the campaign document, and there are a couple of other documents to upload that are related. Your patience is appreciated.]

[Author]

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