Want to help ?

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wololo
Site Admin
Posts: 3728
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Location: Japan

Want to help ?

Post by wololo »

I'm posting this because I received several requests from people who want to help and don't know where to get started. I'll try to update this post with useful links, and I hope I don't sound too "full of myself" with this post.
Wagic is a huge project for a single developer, and there are several ways to help the project become better, depending on your skills and motivation. Here is a list of what we need, in no particular order:

C++ Developers
We are a small team of devs, devs come and go on this project, and we are always looking for new faces :)

Our current policy is the following: if you have C++ skills and want to help the project, show it by posting a patch here (bugfix, new feature, whatever could improve Wagic) in the "code submission" section. Your patch will be reviewed, and if your code looks clean enough to us, you'll be granted write access to the SVN repository.
Information on how to compile the game, where to find the sources, etc, can be easily found on the blog, the wiki or on these forums.
If you're a smartphone owner, and want to help porting Wagic to your favorite device, please, do contact us!

Mods, cards, campaigns...
Wagic is highly customizable, and it is quite easy to add your own cards or your own graphics. It requires no programming skills, but dedication. If you have created a mod or added cards to Wagic, or if you want to know how to do it, go to the dedicated forum: viewforum.php?f=3
An increasing number of cards or mods improves the game replay value and interest, at least as much as code improvements. Wagic wouldn't be so interesting without all its new cards for example.

Promotion
Wagic needs all the promotion it can get, especially since the C&D letter that led people to believe that it's not the same game anymore, or even that it's dead. If you know/own some PSP or MTG dedicated site, don't hesitate to talk about Wagic. The more users we have, the more chance there is that some of them will help the community one day and help improve the game.
Posting gameplay videos or pictures on various sites is also good. Posting those with copyrighted graphics is really borderline, but then again WotC don't seem to complain about all the MWS videos that can be found on youtube...
We live in a world made of advertising. It is a bit sad, but it is not enough for a game to be good, it has to be known. I suck at promoting my own stuff, but I hope that the feedback from the users on various sites will help me here ;)

Bug reports
Clean and detailed bug reports in the dedicated section help us being more productive at actually fixing them rather than trying to confirm their existence.

Donations (and ads on the site)
I have a well-paid job so money is not an issue for me to continue working on the game development. But there are some days when I want to stop working on it,for various reasons. On such days, receiving a donation or seeing that my "daily advertising report" is showing me a non zero value can make a difference. I also want to prove myself that a good project can still generate revenue despite being open source AND amateurish AND on the gray market of homebrews. For you as a user of the game, it is also a way of contributing to the project without investing too much time in its development.

Comments/suggestions on how to improve this post are welcome.
neogokufire
Posts: 63
Joined: Thu Nov 06, 2008 12:19 am

Re: Want to help ?

Post by neogokufire »

Wololo,

I had an idea while I was driving home from work the other day. It got me thinking. Feel free to trash it, if it doesn't sound like something you would encourage / appreciate.

Here's the gist of it.

You are spending a lot of time / money / effort, etc. on this software, and keeping it open source. Right now your revenue is based on donations and some small advertising stuff. But what if, on their own, the users offer a "bounty" for certain additions / feature requests / etc. Instead of saying, you know it would be really cool if... How about, I'd donate $5 if...

You would get to decide where to apply the effort, and whether the reward matches it. Ideally other players would chime in with I'd pay X for that too. Soon maybe $5 would turn into $50 and the 1-2 hrs it would take to make it happen might be worth that to you. Of course you might have some people who won't follow through, but i'd hope that most would. Hopefully it would motivate you to work on things that you have wanted to do, but set aside for one reason or another, and the community would become more involved with the development process, especially those of us who cannot contribute with programming.

And so to start things off, here's a short list that I came up with...

$15 - Multiplayer for Fat PSP, ad-hoc is good enough, if that's the easier way to do it.

$5 - I'll pay this for a built in statistics calculator in the deck editor. Its hard for me to comprehend what ratio of land i should have, what the average casting cost is, etc, things like that. Hopefully this wouldn't be too hard to incorporate. It would also help me with play-testing custom sets and not being next to computer. Doesn't have to be very intricate, maybe just a few averages. A time saver, if nothing else.

$5 - Two-Headed mode. I never got to play this very often with my friends, but it always seemed like fun. Play two decks against one, or one against two.

$2 - I'll pay this for a skip to end button during my turn or the opponents turn. My right trigger cries in pain when I put my PSP away at night...

$2 - Tap all land, sometimes i'd like to cast a 8 cost behemoth of a guy, but it takes 6 seconds, who has 6 seconds these days!

$2 - Ante. One of the things i liked about magic pc game was being able to get an expensive rare for free, by beating some jerk. I have something like 1800+ cards in my database right now, and that will only go up, might be nice to have an alternate way of obtaining cards, due to limitations in the shop size. Also be nice w/ multiplayer to take cards / gives you a hint of your opponents deck color(s) / strategy sometimes, which is cool.

$2 - Search library. Theres some cool cards that have you search your library for X, Y, or Z that I would like to see.

$1 - Mulligan, sure i can just save and exit and start over, but that feels like cheating, and if/when multiplayer happens, it wouldn't be a nice way to go about it.

$1 - Can't think of anything else, so i'll give you an extra $1 if any of the above are implemented. (makes it an even $35 total) U.S. dollars by the way, since thats what i got.

Sorry if this isn't a direction you want to go, but this is one way i can think of to help, without buying something on amazon that i don't want (ads), or sending money at random times(how much, when), which may or may not help with anything in particular, and probably won't lead others to contribute...

Thanks for everything.
wololo
Site Admin
Posts: 3728
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 12:42 am
Location: Japan

Re: Want to help ?

Post by wololo »

Hey, this is not a bad idea.
After next release, I'll try to open a thread where people who want to donate and people who want to code can do this.
We'll try, hopefully it will bring new coders to the project and improve the game :)
neogokufire
Posts: 63
Joined: Thu Nov 06, 2008 12:19 am

Re: Want to help ?

Post by neogokufire »

Haven't played 0.7.1 very much yet, but i see library's are search able. So I owe you $3 at least, was anything else knocked off my list?
superhiro
Posts: 151
Joined: Thu Nov 13, 2008 1:28 pm

Re: Want to help ?

Post by superhiro »

No, not yet =D But I bet there will be in the next releases.
neogokufire
Posts: 63
Joined: Thu Nov 06, 2008 12:19 am

Re: Want to help ?

Post by neogokufire »

Donating $3 now... Thanks wololo!

I encourage everyone else who is enjoying the new stuff in 0.7.1 to send him a few bucks too!
wololo
Site Admin
Posts: 3728
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 12:42 am
Location: Japan

Re: Want to help ?

Post by wololo »

Thanks a lot :)
et_phone_home
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Jun 23, 2009 12:02 am

Re: Want to help ?

Post by et_phone_home »

I was thinking to donate for this project. Everyone that has this game on his/hers PSP SHOULD make a donation to this project. But then i read this excellent idea about implementing new features in your game for a fee. If this idea, that i think is excellent, goes forward i am willing to pay for some features that i think will improve this game.

So in the future you'll have a lot of ideas and better than all, "paid ideas".

Please create A thread where we can put our ideas and the money that we are willing to pay for them!

I think its the better way to raise some money for your need and the game will surely improve to anyone's tastes.

THX from Portugal for creating this game for the PSP.

I'm waiting for the new thread!
et_phone_home
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Jun 23, 2009 12:02 am

Re: Want to help ?

Post by et_phone_home »

First of all, THX for keeping our dream alive:)

Well its time for contribution...


I'm paying 15 Euros for my contribution. And paying 10 Euros for my girlfriend contribution. We are both MTG fans and we were very pleased to see this project ported on the PSP with a already so good quality.

We have to ask you for the inclusion of two things:

My girlfriend request!

- Summoning sickness signaling
Creatures as far as i know don't show the summoning sickness, can you signal it. Maybe they become GreyScalled or have another type of effect to signal the summon sickness.

My request!
i like to see this possibility for infinite replayability:

1color random created deck VS 1color random created deck.

I think this is a easy thing to implement and we will have infinite possibilities of decks, because there are only a few made decks and i like to play with decks that i don't know what will appear until the end of deck.

You can create a deck with something like that from the same color:
18 basic lands
2 non-basic lands
12 creatures
2 sorceries
2 instants
2 artifacts
2 enchantments

for a total 0f 40 cards.

And finally if it is possible in a larger future a similar option:

2 random colors created deck VS 2 random colors created deck.

You can check this type of option in a game that i was on the project and offered the idea for the programmer to implement it. I've create about 2000 cards for this game, but now I'm on a personal project so i had to leave this one. Please check this other PC project at http://www.magmamagicmachine.it/...


I myself am creating a game based in MTG, but more on a Battle/solitaire base. But it is now in stand by because I'm ending programming another amazing game:) than I'll be back to end this one that is one a very advance stage. I'm just adding more cards.

Can check some screenshots.


Image

Image

Image

I hope you don't quit this project but i know sometimes its hard to continue.

I hope you can attend our 2 requests please. And THX again for creating us the opportunity to get MTG everywhere with us on our PSP...

Maybe in future we'll make more donations if this projects keep on a good pace:)
wololo
Site Admin
Posts: 3728
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 12:42 am
Location: Japan

Re: Want to help ?

Post by wololo »

Thanks a lot for your donation.
Your request sounds cool and probably not too difficult to implement. I added it to my todo list :) I'm just afraid that the AI might be very bad with a random deck, but we'll see ;)

Your project looks great, is that a kind of "campaign" where you battle with the rules of Magic ?

also, I know MagMa, but I never tried it. Is it still an active project?

Finally regarding the whole "bounty donations" thing, I gave it a lot of thoughts, and in the end I think it's a half-good idea with some drawbacks.
What I think is that people who want to donate in exchange for a feature can simply ask for that feature in the "wishlist" thread, and swear to themselves that they will donate one day. This way, developers can work on features that are the most important for the game, and not the ones that get the biggest bounty :)
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