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

[James Nash]

Hello everybody!

Thought I'd come out of the shadows and give my 2¢...

On 17 Jan 2008, at 10:11, Kai Sterker wrote:

> > 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
>
> That sounds reasonable. I'll try to incorporate those into the help
> wanted stuff I've written yesterday.

All good points, but I think the way we present our material needs an  
overhaul.

I would imagine that for most people the main website will be the  
primary source of information. After all it's what pages referring to  
Adonthell will generally link to and is also the number one result  
when searching for "adonthell" on Google. However, it has been broken  
for a long time (IIRC Linuxgames disabled the server-side includes)  
so things like the screenshots and art gallery are not accessible.

I know, that much of the new discussions now take place on the Wiki  
but it is has a totally different look and feel and, coming from the  
main Adonthell site, is a bit bard to find (it's not on the home page  
or amongst the navbar links).

Furthermore, we seem to be a project on both Savannah and BerliOS and  
it's not immediately clear what info / docs / code reside on which  
location or if one is supposed to supersede the other.

For someone not familiar with the project I think this is not very  
confidence inspiring.

My suggestion would be that we spend some time overhauling our  
websites to do the following:

- Bring info up-to-date
- Make material like artwork, music, screenshots available again
- Remove or hide away any out-of-date material or sections that  
appear to be dead (for example the developer diary hasn't had an  
update since 2003)
- Interlink the site, blog, sourceforge and berlios pages more tightly
- Update design perhaps?
- Where possible give them all a consistent look and feel (AFAIK  
MediaWiki is themable)


I'm pretty good with PHP / XHTML / CSS so perhaps this is something I  
could help with. As usual I don't have as much time as I did back in  
the good ol' days - I have a lot of commitments in meatspace - but I  
should be able to chip in a bit :-P


> > PS: It might also help to cut down the number of mailing lists, i.e.
> > announce, commit and devel should be enough.
>
> Not sure if that's really scaring people away. In reality, most
> discussion these days goes on on devel anyway. But artwork and plot
> are nice to keep that sort of stuff separate and easier to find. I
> also imagine that artists/writers are not neccessarily interested in
> code-related stuff.

I think the MLs are fine. Although we don't seem to have active  
artists at the moment *ahem* when we do it's useful to keep those  
discussions separate.


Regards,
                        - James

--
Personal site:
http://cirrus.twiddles.com/