interesting. What code are you working on?

I got to see github in action when we (OGA) participated in the Reddit game jam recently. Git is amazing when there are multiple devs.

So far Flare is mostly single-dev. I sometimes accept well-coded contributions for isolated features.

It gets philisophical from here on...

Switching to Git is a question of what I want Flare to be. To me, Flare is still my hobby project. I get to do things the way I want. I made Flare free (open) because I enjoy freedoms. Not necessarily because I want contributors. I admit I have a strong "not developed here" attitude, and an old school style of coding. But it's gotten me pretty far already -- the demo is sorta enjoyable, the code isn't too hard to figure out.

I get the sense that putting code on GitHub is essentially requesting people to experiment and send me pull requests. That would be great if I wanted to build a community of contributors. But I don't want to manage a team; I just want to write a bit of code every now and then, when it sounds fun.

Maybe my curmudgeon-ness is hindering what Flare could be (some grand free software project?). Thoughts? Opinions?

After talking to some of you on IRC, I've decided to give github a spin.

http://clintbellanger.net/rpg/blog/20110603

https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare

I will try to be more open to contributions. Don't be afraid to send in pull requests. And please bear with me while I learn to manage a git repo.

Perhaps a good thing to have would be a "papercuts" list. A papercut would be a small (keyword: small) feature or bug that requires minimal change to code and minimal effort. Create a list of 20 or more of those and you'll keep coders busy for a while, and be able to test out how the Git system works for FLARE.

My papercuts would include: Give powers a fixed damage range option in addition to the weapon damage (eg. base_damage=2,5 instead of base_damage=melee), implement +1 skill rings, change mana cost to be numerical instead of boolean, give powers a % damage option (eg. 'dmg_multiplier=200' would cause the power to do double weapon damage)

Some (bigger) changes that probably would not qualify for papercuts since they would require serious change in the code (though I'd still want to see them in FLARE): enemy/npc patrols, vehicles/steeds.

It seems most of the patches have to be rejected because they are too large. This possibly could reduce the problem of large patches but still get a lot of code work done that Clint can't do/doesn't have time to do himself.

Maybe it's also worth to add following keys to help people discover this project:

- "rpg", "game engine" keywords in readme (to help people searching git for such things)

- add screenshot image displayed directly in the readme text (I use google image search query: "game site:github.com" that shows all game projects with images on github, and probably there are also other people using such technic)