Dev-Section

This part of the website that you are currently reading is used to store some ideas and documentation. Reading it is advised, but what is written there is not authoritative.

FreedroidRPG is entirely free software and free artwork. It is developed exclusively by volunteers in their leisure time. FreedroidRPG depends on these contributions to become a better game.

There are many things you can help with, being a programmer or not does not matter! (A game is not developed entirely by programmers.)

Testing and bug reporting

We need people to try out the game and report anything that does not work correctly or seems to be unstable. The task of testing is growing with the size of FreedroidRPG. We need your help. This may look like something of low importance, but a game without quality assurance is likely to be more frustrating than entertaining.

Small or large projects

We have many project ideas that can be tackled, for example by Google Summer of Code applicants. See below for the project ideas.

Creating new maps

The overall duration of FreedroidRPG is strongly tied to the amount and the size of levels that the player will go through. The current world is quite small, and we need more levels to extend the game. The random dungeon generator can help us, but only to a certain extent.

The leveleditor is accessible from the main menu of the game. Its documentation is scarce, but the developers will happily assist anyone playing with the editor!

Sound effects

The biggest flaw of FreedroidRPG as of this writing is its almost complete lack of decent sound effects, which breaks the immersion of the players. If you can create sound effects, or have time to browse existing free (as in free speech) sound databases, your help is required!

Various

More music, more dialogs, more items, improvements on the gameplay rules (for example rethinking the player stats) are always welcome.

How to contribute

General

To contribute to FreedroidRPG, you will need to get the game from the Git repository. You should also get in touch with the team, in case you have questions or need comments on your idea.

Our advice, based on years of experience working with people making their first contribution to FreedroidRPG or to free software in general, is to start small. Take your idea, and cut it in the smallest pieces that make sense, then do the first piece and submit it. Starting small is the best way of becoming a successful free software contributor - because over-sized projects tend to be motivation killers in the long run.

Our tools and workflow

Communication

IRC is our primary communication means in the team. Many of our contributors do not join the IRC channel and communicate by e-mail or using our ReviewBoard (see below). Google Summer of Code students and applicants are however required to maintain some presence on IRC.

ReviewBoard

We have a FreedroidRPG Reviewboard (abbreviated RB) instance that is used for all incoming changes that affect the game's code (source code, but also maps and dialogs). This is where you will most likely submit the changes you make.

You need to create an account on Reviewboard before you can start submitting tickets or reviewing other people's code (this is strongly encouraged even if you aren't an active FreedroidRPG developer).

if you're new you might want to check this quick guide we've wrote for you. It explains some git flow and Review Board basic aspects. Of course, you'll find much better ones on the internet, so, don't be lazy! ;-)

Trackers

We rely on our bug tracker to list all the bugs that are found, and the requests from people who have a nice idea but are not able to implement it at the moment.

Please report the issues you encounter with the game!

Buildbot

Our buildfarm makes sure that we do not break the build, and automatically cross-compiles Microsoft Windows and MacOSX binaries for the less lucky of us who are stuck to this platform.

Additional documentation

Specific documentation for code, game content and others can be found at their own sections, listed at the top of this page.