Hello all,
So I am really excited to start making games with superpowers, and I would like to be part of growing it into a community. I think it would be beneficial to start a conversation about some ideas I have about the project. All are my opinions only so take them as such.
So first off to provide some background, I am a largely self taught programmer, dropped out of college and went to a bootcamp, no working in web development. from reading through the forums I think there are many self taught and newer developers here. I think this is great because in m opinion superpowers will be most successful if it caters towards beginners. Expert game developers already have a plethora of powerful tools. I intended to use superpowers to get my siblings into programming (well see if that actually works)
-- side note: I do understand the project is very much a work in progress, so nothing is intended to criticize the devs.
1. I think its obvious that the documentation needs a lot of work. This is something I would definitely be willing to help out with once I am able to. Unfortunately I am very new to game development (which is an entirely different world from web apps) so I personally won't be that much more helpful here.
2. the sample projects could be refactored with clarity and simplicity in mind. I think the most useful things the Original developers or some experienced community members could do is sit down and establish some conventions for the 'typical' superpowers game. Typescript is a great language that allows us a lot of flexibility in how we implement things but having one way to do/structure things would really help beginners. As an example in the one example project there is a 'Game' module defined and in another there is a 'Game' namespace defined. I haven't even read the typescript docs yet to learn about how the two differ but it really doesn't matter, there should be some consistency. I know those projects were made quickly to show how to do things, it would be great to polish them up now.
3. community space: I noticed that the reddit community now has a post directing people here. I respect the choice but I strongly feel reddit was a better place. Full disclosure: I work at reddit so I am biased. However these forums are not very functional, It doesn't look like you can even search posts!! This will only create more work for the devs/ more experienced community members who will get the same questions over and over again. Even if itch.io manages to improve the forums this old style of forum software is a horrible user experience. Way worse than reddit which I will add will soon have a much friendlier and modern ui by default. There are many programmers and tech savvy young people on reddit who are pretty much the ideal demographic for this. The subreddit could become a very good place to coordinate community stuff. I would be willing to put in some time to improve the subreddit, We could add a theme to start and figure out other things that could help the community and the devs.
strengths for reddit:
- better support for code formatting
- supports searching posts
- wiki available if we want one.
- tag posts for filtering(channels)
- themeable
- good moderation tools (debatable but we actually have some new stuff in the works.)
- will be improving very rapidly as our engineering team is finally decent sized
- api for integrating with other services
- better visibility on google for posts. ( we are working with search engines to make reddit posts perform well in this regard)
strengths of itch.io
- two language sections ( we could solve this by just using two subreddits or tagging languages )
- same platform the software is hosted on.
- easier editor ( we will likely add an optional wysiwyg style editor soon too)
4. code sharing
The great thing about javascript IMO is npm so it sucks not to be able to use it to share code. On the other hand maybe we don't care as much here. I was thinking about a plugin that would connect to a web service for sharing code that could add scripts to projects. things like algorithms for things we often need to do in games like pathfinding etc. I think I might have seen a post about a superpowers package manager/plugin manager thingy? maybe this overlaps with that.
Is anyone already working on any of this stuff? Is there a central place where people are coordinating for things other than the development of the core/engine?
If not maybe we figure that out here.