This post was originally written by Pizza, a community member. I've rewritten lots of it but tried to align it to
his original post.
This is not a feature request for the developers - it's a request to everyone who wants to help make MegaGlest better. Before telling you
what everyone interested in the game can and should actively contribute, even if - like me - you are not a developer, I will explain
why we need to do this:
We (I'm talking as a community voice here, since this has hardly been said before) can continue to open 200 feature requests threads per day, we can criticise the developers because they are, in our eyes, not fast enough, we can say that MegaGlest is crap because it does not have
some feature and so on. But the result of this (I think) will be that the MegaGlest developers will stop the develoopment of this awesome game because they will be tired of all this inconstructive criticism and MegaGlest will just become unplayable with no new features, just newly discovered bugs etc. Do you want this to happen? I DONT! So this is my call to everyone who wants to not just be a consuming couch potato but an active contributor: help MegaGlest and the developers! How?
Here are some ideas:
Community organising- Schedule and announce game events - yes, everybody can do this!, such as multi-player games for players in a given region in the world, tournaments etc. Announce it on the forums and we'll do our best to make it more widely known.
- Think of other ways to further the community, discuss it, in a group, and do it! Think of game data contests (who creates the best map in just an hour, the best tileset in a day, the best scenario storyline on a weekend etc.)
- Think of new ways to encourage others to get more involved in actually creating (in contrary to just debating, which, unless it is followed up by real work doesn't change anything) a nicer gaming experience for all. Stifle a change of peoples' mentality from that of a consumer to that of a creator.
- Help moderate the forums - talk to Omega or Titi after you've demonstrated, on the forums, that you know the do's and don'ts of forum moderation
- Help gardening the wiki and improve the game documentation there
- Tell to yor friends about MegaGlest, and tell them to tell theirs, so there will be a broader player, and ideally, developer community around MegaGlest
Modding and translations- Make quality maps, tilesets, scenarios and techtrees (can be single factions), then request for them to be reviewed for inclusion in the game or mod menu
- Respond to game data requests in the Mods forums (e.g. some people recently posted that they are in need of voice recordings with certain accents or in specific languages)
- Translate MegaGlest to a new language or take over maintenance of an existing translation
Testing and Quality Assessment- Report bugs in a correct and detailed way as you spot them
- Provide constructive criticism and feedback and make proposals
- Test alpha, beta and other development versions as they become available, on as many operating systems and platforms as possible
- If you are knowledgeable enough to build MegaGlest yourself, please do so regularly, test the builds and provide feedback. Or just use the snapshot builds
- Proof read existing translations and provide corrections
Donations- If you have a 24/7 (dedicated/virtual private) server with spare resources you can set up a gameserver there or provide trusted community members with access credentials so they can set one up and manage it.
- Offer bounties on features you would like to see implemented (I dont know whether the developers actually like this idea - maybe it's better if you ask them before doing so)
- Donate some money to cover our hosting costs and to make it possible to have game contests.
- If you run a business and can make some freebies available as contest trophies with limited strings attached, please get in touch.
OK, these were just
some ideas on how to help MegaGlest... For those who may now wonder "what did pizza actually do for MegaGlest?": I translated MegaGlest to Itlalian, I keep this translation up to date, I report bugs and as soon as someone makes a Linux build of the development version I'm happy to test it.
Edited by tomreyn (January 2016) to add link to snapshot builds, remove request for custom builds.
