Just some thoughts on who decides what

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Trilarion
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Just some thoughts on who decides what

Post by Trilarion »

Obviously this question would arise sooner or later in one form or the other. So I had some thoughts about how we can at least make transparent how decision about this remake are made.

Let me first state that I am a big fan of democracy. However I really think this form of organization is not suitable for such a project. The most important reason for me to follow a different approach is that I spend my free time and money (for upkeep of this domain) on the project and by this I want to realize my personal dream about a better Imperialism. Would I spend that much time if it was a completely different project? I guess not. So there are some things I will insist on, for example the Panzer General like combat system. On the other hand I cannot complete this alone and I also do not want to. I need other fine men and women who contribute ideas, translations, code .. or even artwork. So I am dependent on a community and I better listen to it. I know I cannot have my say everytime or I will be all alone in a little while. At the very least I promise that every contribution will be honored by an entry in the credits.

In the light of this the best form of organization seems to be like a publicly traded company. The time and effort that you spend on the game represents the portions of shares that you own of it. The higher the portion the more you have to say and decide where the journey is going. For now I would say that 50%+x of the project's shares are in my possession. But with time going on this might as well change.

The big advantage: we're doing open source here. So anybody having a different dream, you can fork anytime. What's mine is your's too. As I see it with open source, everybody can become happy.

Of course I hope that over time we can form a productive team which shares a common idea - of creating a good strategy game, similar to the old Imperialism.

To make the organization even more detailed I thought we could have roles. This would include:
  • Programmers - programming the game
  • Artists - doing artwork
  • Designers - discussing and analysing the game rules
  • Translater - translating it
  • Tester - running latest releases and giving feedback
  • Supporter - if you are doing a bit of something from above or just give a thump up
Of course one can have more than one role at the same time and anyway there would be no special privileges attached. But internally and on the credits list I would like to think in this terms. And I would suggest that then for example artwork issues are then primarily discussed between artists and so on.

There is one more role, the founder. But this is restricted to one person. Me. 8-)

I hope I could make transparent how I think decisions in this project will be reached.
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Trilarion
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Re: Just some thoughts on who decides what

Post by Trilarion »

Some more thoughts here:

I realized that actually many contributors to open source might have their special idea of what a programm/game should look like and what it should be able to do. For example, someone just might want to have an as much as possible exact Imperialism 1 clone with multiplayer combat. However we need to work in teams because alone nobody can accomplish anything. This means everybody always has to make sacrifizes. But maybe not as much as one might think. So the deal could be the following: If you help me with my idea I help you with your idea. Kind of a trade. If both ideas are sufficiently similar, one can use a lot of synergies, i.e. both projects would be finished a lot faster than without the teamwork.

Transfered to this project it means that potentially a whole family of games, even games more close to the original Imperialism, can result from this project if the contributors can afford the energy to do so.
Veneteaou
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Re: Just some thoughts on who decides what

Post by Veneteaou »

That's kind of been my reasoning so far: I can create art, music, mechanics, etc. and they should be viable across a variety of games, so I may as well be working for as many "Imperialism" projects as I can find. Some will be more to my liking than others, but at this point I'm mostly looking for something to make progress and that pushes me to do the same.
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