Figured I'd introduce myself as well :) My name is Olaf, I'm a German native but living in the San Francisco bay area, have been in the US since 2000 and in the bay area for three years. I've worked in the game industry for a few years on a few large titles as a software engineer. I've used Linux at home for a few years now (Kubuntu for the last five) and would like to see more quality (commercial *and* open source) games on the platform. And of course, I've got $0.02 to add ;)
There are quite a few good ideas out there already, but one thought that I saw I would like to reinforce: to draw people to free games, we need as good a selection of high quality games as possible. Getting developers on the platform is obviously crucial in that respect, and I believe one of the keys to that door is to have good development platforms. There are a variety of free game and 3D engines out there, and the more accessible they are, the easier it would be for developers to get started on their game projects. This includes maintaining and packaging to make sure the latest versions are available, but also resources such as example code, tutorials, and support for the developers. Most of these are left to the teams developing the respective middleware, but it would be nice to have a central resource to learn how to bring a simple app using, for example, Ogre, SDL and OpenAL up and running from the ground up, or how to build, texture, skin, animate and export a model for a particular engine in Blender. Let's make it easy for developers to get started on their projects by providing them with the resources they need to learn. The second, and just as crucial, point is IMO, to help bring these projects to completion. Many free game projects exist out there, but few actually make it out the door, into a 'shipping' or even playable state. There are a variety of causes for this, one of them being that there are simply not enough people and not enough time - something we may be able to help with if we form a central hub that programmers, artists and designers can revolve around, to find projects they're interested in working on, and to take on tasks on these projects. I imagine something along the lines of, someone interested in game development browsing launchpad for game projects, looking at screenshots, concept art and game designs, zeroing in on a particular project and next thing, grabbing the source and taking on a task - which could be modeling, texturing, writing script, designing and implementing a needed system in the code, recording and processing audio, fixing bugs, etc. etc. - there are so many different tasks from different disciplines on a game project, and getting the right people together is a recipe for success. We should make it fun and easy for the right people to start working together on a project. I apologize if this was rambling, and hope I did more than just point out the obvious - just wanted to throw a couple of ideas out there :) Olaf
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