+1
That can probably work. I like that idea. It is not a competition, and not everyone has to join. Though it probably won’t be a “mini-game” once this community is done with it. :
I don’t see this working… ever.
I’m already working on a project with a close mate i’ve known for years. It is just two of us, and there are times, very frequently where we want to rip each others throats apart. Imagine doing this with a community of 100’s of people who barely know each other.
Rather than making a game, i’d be happy to contribute to a codebase for a general purpose world editor with modular plugin architecture to be able to be plugged in with existing projects written in LWJGL/Java2D/openGL.
[quote=“DrHalfway,post:22,topic:40125”]
Having a small team of programmers that do not know eachother, working on the same codebase, regardless of whether it is as game or an editor, will be such a chaos that before long everybody will have left as it was pure agony. What you need to work together is to be in the same room, discussing plans and designs before and during coding.
[quote=“DrHalfway,post:22,topic:40125”]
Try to seperate the tasks, so that there is minimal overlap in code that is worked on by each team member, using interfaces to make the modules communicate.
Actually, that would work. The key is to come up with an overall plan and break the work into almost standalone tasks. Ideally each task is assigned to an individual. The team requires a strong leader. While everyone can contribute ideas, the team leader must filter and meld them.
If you think of how Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Dyson etc. got started, each was formed from one or two people with a good idea, who created the first prototype between them. Having shown that the project is viable, they could draw other people and funding to the team. This requires people skills as well as technical skills, to make the difficult transition. Look at Marcus Pearson Persson to see how it’s done.
I think a community project with a pre-defined theme, made from a predeveloped core game engine, would work. As you say, it would be like doing a mod for a commercial game. The big problem would be art assets, since we are mostly programmers here. It would also need a level designer, which is actually more work than the game code. The most obvious solution would be to do a retro-style game, in which programmer graphics are expected. We could have a common art repository for player character art, so as to maintain some commonality across levels. Each level would need to be standalone and the plot loose enough to withstand the loss of levels, as people would drop out.
The drawback is that most people contribution would be as level designers rather than programmers. Would that actually capture people’s imagination? Maybe the game engine could have plug in AI modules, to give more programmer interest. Maybe plug in custom animations. It’s making me think how such a modular design would look.
We could do a 2D platformer. Everyone shares the same game engine and character art assets, but designs the level from a fixed set of platform assets, which can be reskinned for each level.
It might be fun to do a ‘Robot wars’ style competition. There is a standard Arena game engine. A class is written that encapsulates each players robot animation and AI. Some standardization of attack strength and frequency would be required to keep the playing field level. This would allow everyone to do some programming, artwork and sound effects in a common framework. We could have head-head or general melee.
Anyway, the ‘How’ is more important than the ‘What’.
As a Swedish pe(a)rson, I chuckled at this.
Cheers! 
There was actually a law invented to explain why community projects fail:
“The Law Of Diminishing Marginal Utility …”
(where x is the time invested, and y is the marginal pleasure of thinking “im the best coder in the world, look at my output”)
Seriously, the reason why bigger collaborative (unpaid) projects fail, is because the
returned pleasure of adding stuff reduces the more others contribute and the bigger the project gets.
Added (especially code) changes are likely to be small, and need to yield many contraints to keep it fitting in.
Plus the coordination between all members eats up on the time … time taken away from actually producing stuff.
Competitions are better here, since many people can contribute their own ideas to the project (which is the list of competition games)
I like this idea.
I just played this 4-second frenzy, and the games are utterly crap.
I’m sure I (and lot of people here) could make in an afternoon a better game than most of those. Maybe it can be a good showcase of java gaming.
The games from 4k linked together are way better than the four second frenzy.
Ouch. Yeah so even when you get past the biggest problem (getting someone to step up and act the project lead) you’re still flying at warp speed towards a wall.