Re: [Adonthell-general] Getting contributors (was Re: Kudos on [Adonthell-Devel])

[Ingo Ruhnke]

On Jan 16, 2008 9:50 PM, Kai Sterker <address@hidden> wrote:
> Further suggestions (and help) welcome, of course. More stuff to
> follow over the next couple days.

I think the most important part is to establish, in a few clear sentences:

1) Where the game currently is
2) Where the team currently is lacking or even who is left of the old team
3) Where the game wants to go
4) When it wants to reach that point
5) What kind of talents are needed

Especially 1) is important, since with the last real release being
some years old it can get near impossible for an outsider to find out
what exactly is going on or what the goal is, even more so with a
story driven game. 4) of course depends on the number of contributors,
but I think it always helps to have a realistic reachable goal
somewhere near.

Also it is very important to get basically all contributors together
at once, since when you try to collect them one by one, they will
come, look at a mostly dead project, lose interest and leave again. So
you will never build the critical mass of developers to get something
done.

All that said, I have a very hard time to get contributors myself.
GotM worked kind of well for a while, but for most part it were the
same five developers over and over again and after a handful of
projects, we simply seem to have run out of them, since everybody is
stuck maintaining one of the previous GotM projects or has become busy
in real life. So I don't know how well that would work these days,
i.e. we didn't have a new project for a long while, still might be
worth a try.

It as also far better to get a few dedicated developers then to get
lots of undedicated ones, since the last kind tends to end up tweak
the engine here and there but never drive the game as a whole forward.

PS: It might also help to cut down the number of mailing lists, i.e.
announce, commit and devel should be enough.

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