Twelve Years of Wograld Development, a Look Back on My Biggest Mistakes

When I started Wograld, I had no idea how much it would effect me and completely warp my life. I honestly wish I had had a different time coming into my early twenties, but unfortunately, twelve years later, I cannot imagine things any differently. I do suggest if you have a passion for something more worthwhile than game development, do that instead, don't waste your life. Unfortunately, I do know people who won't listen to me, and who will do game development as a hobby or even as a career regardless of what I say, so this rest of this post is for those people, or people thinking about becoming one of those people.

1. Not learning to code sooner and not putting more time into coding. Coders get a lot more respect and have a lot more say in the direction of a project rather than writers, artists or musicians, so learn some applied logic people, sure, it might suck, and segmentation fault might suck, but do it anyway, do whatever you have to to learn it. I mean whatever, and then keep practicing.

2. Believing that marketing is just traditionally pretty boothe babes in high heels and has absolutely nothing to do with your open source project.

 

If no one ever hears about your project, no one will ever test or play it. You can't rely on the open source community to care about your game, you have to reach outside that traditional demographic because almost everyone in the open source community falls into one of the following demographics

1. believes games are a waste of time and wishes they would go away or

 2. already has their own game project they are working on. 

 

I wish I would have taken that life coaching class earlier. Sure, it might have seemed like an utter waste of money to some people, but it was where I finally got introduced to the concept of marketing, and I started to actually think about it in a different way, rather than as some kind of evil to be avoided at all costs.

3. Not worrying about burnout, at the same time not realizing that I can't give up even when I sort of want to give up.

 

There are a lot of abandoned partly finished projects for a reason. People get busy with life (hopefully, the other possibility is to awful to think about but unfortunately has probably happened to some developers) I didn't have a way to sustain my focus and attention. I distracted myself with playing really bad repetitive games, like diablo2 until my windows 98 machine died, because I was just too miserable to do anything else. Don't do that people. You do have to play games so you know how to make them, but once you understand the basic game mechanics and have had fun, there is no reason to play them over and over again while they make you feel sick. Its like eating a bunch of icecream because once upon a time you enjoyed it but now you are puking up your guts.

4. Not having the humility to work on other peoples' projects.

This is a really really hard one for me to admit. I started my own project with this big ego, thinking like I would be the next Linus Torvalds of game development or something. It seems funny now, or maybe just a bit insane, well okay, a lot insane except for the lack of a word salad. Instead, I should have worked on other open source projects, sure that horrible open source roguelike that kills newbies when they so much as look at it isn't going to be my favorite, or that real time strategy game with ugly graphics, but if I had worked on projects even though I didn't enjoy playing them very much, i would have gained valuable development experience whether it was in code, artwork or something else. I suggest you do so too even if you have your own pet project that is going to be really awesome and not tedious like open source game x, that you have decided to work on for a bit instead. Alpha testers are always wanted. Please download from the latest git, compile and run it, and not from he releases that are probably already out of date (unless for some reason the project has things that don't compile in master, but I don't think most well run projects do.

The project should have from 1-20 active developers, and by active, that means commits to the repository within the last month. On the low end, you might not get a response for your help, on the high end they might have more newbies wanting to help with the project than they can possibly use.

Wograld Alpha 0.1.0 newbie tower

I want people to know that, yes, I did release a video on the awesomeness of my
game development.  These days it seems everyone wants videos, so alright, here is video.  Go clone the git right now , read the README, compile, run and start playing!!!  Alpha testers, there is still time to get involved and shape the future of
this game.

Gitting up to date

Wow, I know it has been quite some time since I updated this blog.  Believe it or not, I actually am continuing to work (well, a bit on and off) on the project. As of this year, we made the long in coming move of moving to git.  Sourceforge ended CVS support back in November, and that is what prompted our decision (well, actually my decision to change.  At first I wasn't sure, should I import all the 10+ years of project history with all the *** in it or, just start over fresh with the latest stuff.  I decided to leave all the old *** out, because its just not really useful to new developers anymore.  This project has come a long way since the half-baked fork of crossfire days.  So much artwork has been replaced.  I redid some folders to make it more newbie friendly (no more separate arch folder for the server, and the new music files, are naturally included with the client.)  I realize I don't have to stick to the old and poorly thought out conventions from the old game. 
So once I switched to git, we have been making regular commits, and git isn't really that hard to learn.  Its actually easier than CVS.  I don't bother with all those separate testing directories.  I just test it right in my sandbox.  It makes it so much easier. I just simply don't include changed files that don't need to be included, and check with git status to make sure I included all the right files and none of the wrong ones before I commit. 
We have done a lot. A lot of artwork, a lot of music, a lot of code, but there is still much more to do.