Re: new game submission

[Thomas Mills Hinkle <Thomas_Hinkle alumni brown edu>]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 9:49 PM, Christopher Harvey <chris basementcode com> wrote:

Hi,
Not sure if this is the right list....there are many gnome related lists.
I've got an AI agent working for a 2 player checkers like game. I was thinking I'd slap a gtk gui on top of it and see if the gnome community was interested in adopting it into the games package. Obviously I'd continue to maintain it.

It was for school, assignment details here:
http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~jpineau/comp424/index.html
That page suggests I wrote it in java. it's not, mines in C++.

Basically I have two questions:
Is it worth my time submitting to gnome, do I have a chance?

I think that the general response to new games has been "no", at least in the short term. Two new games were recently (within the last few years) accepted, and it takes a fair bit of energy to keep those up to date and deal with bugs. I say this as the author of one of those games (sudoku) -- I can tell you that even a simple game that seemed relatively stable can have a lot of problems that come out of the woodwork once it is widely adopted.

That said, there's no reason you can't release your game on your own. I'd recommend setting up a sourceforge project for your game and developing it there. Believe me, you'll need to have a good number of users before you've really tested the program. Once you have some users and have been through a few release cycles, people will likely begin to package your game for distros, etc. At that point, you'll have a mature enough game that gnome-games might be interested the next time people are up for taking on some more maintenance work.

A final note -- it looks like people are interested in gnome-games becoming flashier with the help of clutter, so if you are interested in inclusion (long-term), you might start thinking about ways to make a really cool looking checkers game that will feel more modern -- think about 3D effects, telepathy support, etc, and design from the get-go to make it easy to add these components.

Tom