Please make more games!

[paramat]

Xudo, i agree that contributions are best discussed first.

[jas]

I would like to point out that contributions to MTG are considered very strongly because MTG is a base game, meant to be expanded upon.

Speaking of MTG, I would like to see it use more engine features.

[Xudo]

Xudo,
MTG is here on GitHub https://github.com/minetest/minetest_game
I agree that contributions are best discussed first, you can do this by opening an issue https://github.com/minetest/minetest_game/issues

There is a difference between "features must be discussed before implementation" and "feature should be implemented when discussion ends".
Some discussions have no definition of "end". For example medkits in CTF.

What about other points I have written in my post?
Is it clear when discussion about some feature is over and ready for development?
Is it clear which arguments in discussion are important for project and which are not?

[paramat]

Xudo, you have a very extensive and precise list of requirements for you to contribute. Some of your requirements make good sense, some make no sense.
MTGame doesn't meet all your requirements and i don't know of any project that does. I think your requirements are excessive and over-demanding.

> I'm sure that there are more people that share same thoughts as me.

I've never known of anyone who has the same requirements.

[TumeniNodes]

There is a desperate lack of artists in this community.

More or less, yes. I think this is also a political problem, mostly. Many, many artists simply do not share our values of freedom and just insist on their copyrights like everyone else.
It's much easier nowadays to find a programmer for a free software project than to find artists, especially skilled artists.
Maybe this is also simply a “marketing fail” of free software, many people think this only affects programmers (which is of course completely false).

The idea of freedom simply is foreign to most artists. The problem is not that there are not good artists, the problem is to convince them to work with us. =)

I realize the comment was made a while back. I meant to comment on it back then but got distracted then forgot :P

There are actually plenty of artists who, the idea of freedom is not foreign to.

A big part of the problem, regarding artists in the programming world is, they are actually not appreciated as much as some think or even say they are.
Sometimes an artist will contribute work to a project, only to have a programmer hack it to what they feel it needs to be. I have experienced this personally on another project a few years ago, and it really pissed me off.

Programmers tend to want to dictate to artists, and can at times be rather dismissive toward the amount of work an artist puts into a piece, simply because they can achieve something close with code, or even some image editing software using scripts and a few keystrokes.
A programmer would not like an artist telling them how to code or how it should look, so why do programmers not understand that, when they call for an artist, yet want the result to be what they feel it should be?

Programmers often tend to put their own vision before the artist as well, even after asking artists for help.
If you are going to recruit an artist for your project, then allow them to "do" the art, or they will lose interest of possibly get frustrated and stop contributing.
I am a fairly flexible artist but many are not... a flexible artist is a rare find.

Often times, artists are left out of the "Developer" title which can be an insult that many do not understand.

If you need an artist, and take one on... you need to allow them to direct the art, especially when it is a "free-time, volunteer" project.
An artist, just as anyone else, spends much of their time creating art they may not particularly be happy with, to earn money... when they create art outside of that aspect... they need to enjoy what they are doing, or they will go elsewhere.

And note that there is a difference (most often) between an "artist", and a graphic designer..., and often a programmer, makes a horrible graphic designer (whether they like to hear/admit it or not)

As for there not being as many "Libre" artists out in the "free" world... well, remember this..., there are far less jobs out there calling for an "artist", than there are for a programmer, and the pay rate is substantially different.
Being a "starving artist" is not just a phrase ; )

[Xudo]

Xudo, you have a very extensive and precise list of requirements for you to contribute. Some of your requirements make good sense, some make no sense.
MTGame doesn't meet all your requirements and i don't know of any project that does. I think your requirements are excessive and over-demanding.

Can you be more specific?
Having design document is not over-demanding requirement.
You know what you want to get in the end, right?
I want to see goals and values of developers community before I will do any work.

I've never known of anyone who has the same requirements.

People probably won't bother with expressing their thoughts. They just "no, I am not interested".
How much people that do write their requirements do you know?

[texmex]

Having design document is not over-demanding requirement.
You know what you want to get in the end, right?
I want to see goals and values of developers community before I will do any work.

That’s the crux with MTG: No one wants to express a vision for the game, therefore no game design document, hence little to no values nor goals. In fact it’s clearly stated from issue conversations that a plan is not even desirable. Which in itself is not ”wrong”, but it definitely makes it harder to rally certain types of contributors such as artists and designers.

People probably won't bother with expressing their thoughts. They just "no, I am not interested".

This resonates with my experience as well.

[Xudo]

If there is no vision, then it is not a problem. It could be developed just like the game itself by answering a list of questions.
First question is: Can you describe your target audience?
You can develop values and goals by analysing your audience.
Second question is: Why MTG is the only game, bundled with MT by default?
It is very possible, that audience is heterogeneous. Some features might be cool for players of one type of player, but bad for other.

[MisterE]

@ Rubenwardy

I know that it has been decided to only package minetest with MG as a modding base, and not officially package other games, which can be downloaded from the content database of forums.

However, I would like to suggest a compromise.

Have a page on the Minetest website labeled "prepackaged games". It links from the download page of the "normal" minetest. On it, are versions of minetest, prepackaged with games other than vanilla Minetest Game. I seem to remember that licensing issues were a reason for not officially supporting games, so the fix would be that instead of actually hosting the games, the prepackaged game page would have links to builds of minetest with the individual games, hosted by each game developer.

[rubenwardy]

We're heading towards not including any games in Minetest by default, and instead having a list of available games be the first thing you see when downloading minetest. Or perhaps we may keep MTG, but we will have the list as the first thing you see. I think ContentDB is better than having prepackaged versions, but perhaps there's use in having a builder to make installers with certain ContentDB games

[MisterE]

ok, that sounds good! Thx

[afflatus]

The new content tab is great. I have discovered several interesting games like NodeCore and Hamlet's Quest as well as useful mods.
I have designed a game, took a long break and I've just started on a new one. Neither of them are much more than re-workings of MTG, but I have done considerable work to strip out and split up the monolithic default mod. When I'm a bit further with my new project I might push out a bare-bones framework version on the basis of some earlier comments here.
I have all the skills, apart from blender, but even that is learnable. I don't work well with teams because I'm rubbish at arguing my position and other people rarely like my ideas. I'm not a programmer, just a musician / artist who happens to write code when it is necessary. So yeah, I am my own project leader. Sometimes I argue with myself.
There are limits to what you can do with the Minetest engine / Irrlicht, this is going to be a voxel game whatever, so we're stuck with digging and placing blocks in a cuboid world. If you want originality, then you need to find some breakable rules. I don't think better graphics would make a lot of difference, better physics would be awesome, but there's a limit to how far away from 'minecraft-like' you can go before needing a different game-engine. It's almost impossible to come up with a game concept that hasn't been done.
I'm more than happy just scratching my own itches and making a game that I want to play.

[afflatus]

So part of the problem is due to the ambiguity of the term 'games'. Mine*(type) environments are not strictly games and the open-endedness somewhat mitigates against conventional game design - you can't play 'Go' on a board with no edges - so most competitive pursuits require in-game arenas and suchlike. Most 'games' are just overgrown mods like mine which have been forced to reinvent the wheel due to the awkwardness of MTG code.

It was the default trees that started it in my case. They look nothing like apple trees for one thing, they just hang in the air when you take the bottom nodes out and don't produce more fruit after spawning. Realism be damned but believability is important, nobody likes floating legless trees.

The other consideration was that I wanted to relocate my original 'game' - Grailtest - in medieval Europe. This shouldn't have been a big deal, but it involved removing potatoes, pumpkins, rails and tnt amongst other things. While it is easier to override stuff than it was when I started, it should be as simple as removing the mod that provides it. MTG just isn't well generalised, so requires major rewriting in order to significantly change the mood / theme. Once you're in that deep you may as well tweak the gameplay too.

In the end development was derailed by Irrlicht lighting bugs that I had great difficulty getting anyone in the engine department to take seriously, constant server crashes; and to a certain extent, the fact that running a server was so time-consuming I didn't have time to code any more.

So I gave up and for the last couple of years or so I've just been a player. I don't want to design a radical new game concept, I just want to be able to create a themed version, albeit this time a non-earth-based fantasy world. This week I have mostly been designing trees, so far so good. Next week I shall move on to writing fruiting code and then look at growth and cultivation of flowers and vegetables. I have not considered the skybox yet or how to represent the world's second moon. And I'm really not looking forward to mobs, I mean, fauna.

I'm inspired by NodeCore's formspec-free approach, but it doesn't suit the kind of rpg / storytelling I'm interested in, so I'm going to have to face the 2D GUI issues at some point. I like the idea of doing as much as possible in-game, but text-rendering possibilities are limited.

So this isn't why I'm not designing a game, this is more about why the game I'm designing probably won't end up on any official list of games. I probably won't finish it, I'll make a playable version. I don't know if I can be bothered to run a server again, so it won't get play-tested.

I think the call-out needs a design spec itself, I think we need to be clear about what constitutes a game mod, a mod game and a stand-alone game, or whatever terms you prefer. Examples of original games, directions that could be explored are also necessary (noting that some have been given in the course of this conversation). I'm at a point where, having already thrown out MTG core, I'm looking at how I might want to do other aspects differently.

What would be a "game-changer" in terms of Minetest?

[Astrobe]

We're heading towards not including any games in Minetest by default, and instead having a list of available games be the first thing you see when downloading minetest. Or perhaps we may keep MTG, but we will have the list as the first thing you see. I think ContentDB is better than having prepackaged versions, but perhaps there's use in having a builder to make installers with certain ContentDB games

People are easily lost if they are not explicitly told what to do. You present them a list of games? They won't know what to download. If you make them think, they won't like it. At least in first ten minutes after installing...

Some games are heavy. Don't make them think they'll have to wait three minutes to play. Some games are unmaintained and broken (prepackaged versions solves this one, but then the burden is on you to test and decide which games you include). Don't make them think MT is broken.

This is a free-beer game. People won't have any second thoughts about throwing it away if it doesn't work on first try.

For this reason, you do need something playable out-of-the-box. MTG is better than nothing in this regard, but I think a tutorial like Wuzzy's is a better basis in order to achieve your goals.