Hi,
Thank you very much for your feedback and great advise.
I loved the idea of a "Restore Defaults" button to revert settings; you can easily end up with a settings configuration that make the game unusable. I implemented it. Thank you.
I should now get into the icon and help issues. Then packaging, polishing, ... It's a lot of work to get to a decent application :)
Again, thank you. For sure I will come back to here for wise advise.
Best regards,
Juan.
On Wed, 2014-09-24 at 18:16 +0200, Juan R. Garcia Blanco wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks! Yeah, I forgot to commit the icons; for now I'm using the
> KSpaceduel application icon. Now it should be fixed if you want to
> retry.
>
> Thank you for your prompt reply.
>
> Best regards,
> Juan.
OK, it looks promising! There are of course a few things that could be
cleaned up (the pause button should just say "unpause" instead of using
the destructive-action style class, and the text at the top of the game
area would look better in the header bar) and it seems to still need an
AI player and an icon and user help, but it looks largely complete.
I'm not sure if this game is a good fit for our traditional set of GNOME
games, simply because it feels significantly more complicated than the
others. A first run dialog to explain the basics would help, but it
still feels much more difficult to play than our other arcade-style
games: I think that's an inherent consequence of the gravity mechanic.
The preferences are also dramatically more complicated than we'd usually
provide (as a tip: add a destructive Restore Defaults button to the
header bar). So I'm personally not interested in championing this game
as a GNOME 3.16 feature or for inclusion in the gnome-apps moduleset.
But don't let that stop you! We've been slowly de-branding our games so
that they feel like standalone games rather than one big collection, and
that means the whims of the collection maintainers don't matter anymore.
The remaining steps are to archive our GNOME games wiki page (I just
need to move the pretty banners that recently appeared on it to all the
subpages) and remove the "This game is part of GNOME Games" line from
all of our about dialogs.
So the "GNOME Games" are not really a thing anymore, and you should try
to get your module included in GNOME git anyway. Once there, you can use
the GNOME infrastructure for tarball releases and you can add your game
to the gnome-world jhbuild moduleset. Getting into gnome-apps may or may
not be more tricky; I'm not sure if there's criteria for that anymore or
not. Here is the process for proposing a new module for GNOME Git:
https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/Prerequisites -- I think
your project meets all the requirements except a previous public
release, but you can always push a git tag to GitHub and advertise the
tarball of the git repo as a release. (You probably want a real icon
first.)
Might I suggest renaming the module from gnome-spaceduel to gspaceduel:
the gthing style of names is typical of old GNOME applications, and
makes it immediately feel dated instead of fresh and interesting.
Happy hacking!
Michael