 Okay, so hi, I am a shed and instead of talking about my project. I'm going to talk about yours So just for the clickbait title, but in general like okay forget about your project I don't want to talk about Contributors and anything I have a great new idea for a game get this I Want an MMO where you go around and you're like itching you have these itches that you want to scratch and And you know you you find other players and you go around and they that have their own itches And you are comparing itches what itches to me what itches to you and like it's cooperative Maybe our itches are compatible and we can scratch them together. It's very very friendly very nice. It's Something that I don't think any of you ever seen and I need like developers and artists and designers medical resets Everything like does anyone here want to help and become a contributor in my game? Okay, I saw like a thing or two kind of Which is a bit frustrating so I will have to go back to my original presentation I wanted to gay to call the game scratch that or but but scratch that and Why do we want contributors? This is actually a question when I talked that I want I said that I want to talk about motivation people said like why? But is it really necessary that an open source project has more than one developer? So I asked myself like if a developer releases the source code and no one reads it is it still open source and you can Approach it from one approach which is like ethics. We think that source should be open We want people to be able to change our code It doesn't matter if they do it or not it's about your ownership of applications that are on your computer But I I prefer another approach like that open source is like loud like you can do it on your own but it's way better together and and This made me think like of a thought experiment. Let's let's do that github tinder You know people all the time they said like oh, I want to you know contribute to some open source project I had it so many times and then like this github and you could like swipe left or swipe right And there's like my radius of interest. I can check what languages. I know what things this sounds really really nice, but um, I Don't think it will work like Open source is not exactly like finding a partner the alternative for not finding a partner is being alone and people come to this Like they really don't want to be alone and then turn them for not being a contributor is watching cat videos, which is kind of nice So it's not really that someone Wants to work about your project. It's like people are saying I want to contribute to open source in general and Then this is kind of amorphic. It's not really Anyway near actually being a contributor and for it to change there like you have to find the cat videos So it is Eric S Raymond in the cathedral and the bazaar said that every good work of software Start by scratching a developer's personal it now I want to expand on it a bit a bit because like even if you and Contributor if you if you're not the first person who writes the first line of code it's still like a Good work of software that you're doing as part of a bigger work of software. So It should still be the each like the second contributor Should have an itch that is compatible with the first contributor. Otherwise, they're going to watch cat videos instead so We need these people these contributors with the compatible itches and the skills to scratch them and each whatever For this we somehow have to reach them because as there is no github thing that they should come to the project and You know see what you do figure that they have the each that is compatible to you and start working Which bring me to trick number one Make something that you already know It makes people each How do you do that? Clones and alternatives if you think about all the talks today that we had so far I actually checked it and sorry I wasn't in the visual and augmented reality one But all the ones like we had a talk about Godot, which is kind of an alternative for some other unnamed game engines We have lots of games that are like open X like open aoe or open raw You we have free sieve we have Libre office. It's like in general open source project So like we see this a lot of times We just saw like porting doom and before that people were talking about AI for Starcraft would brutal What why why in open source? We keep seeing all these references clones and alternatives to regular software and this is like Because it gives you a shared vision Like the people had this each in the first place I Played a game. I had fun Now when someone tells me what his open source project is he can say like I'm doing this and I'm in my head This was fun. I can do that and I will have fun or I want to expand things like the alternatives and people Have something in proprietary software that they don't like they cannot change it So they're looking for an open source alternative where they can So in which video I did like a very New quick check and it seemed like a more than a third of the project on the list of open source games Where remakes or clones and stuff like this and this was not by passing every line by just searching the word clone And there's like a huge site of OS games game clones in general, it's a bit you know Impressive how much of the open source work is is not really original in in the way The problem is that it's limits your options like I'm I'm you know, I'm a creative person I have my own ideas. Why do I have to make someone that somebody else made? I want to make my project and I want to find contributors for it. This makes sense and and Obviously if you already started your project, it is a bit too late to the side that it is a remix something else So this brings me to trick number two Actively it's your future contributors like if that each didn't exist in the first place. Let's try to each them Release your game have people play it Gather an audience and then when people play it they're itching This this is very nice It's it's a bit the same as we talked to before about proprietary game that they like created the each for us this time we created each for us If you're really really like brave just leave small imperfections that will annoy people so they want to fix them I haven't done it yet Yeah All my all the imperfections are not a liver. It's just like part part of the process It's very nice because if people actually take the game and people will have more patience trying a game than reading what your new Fancy project is about because a game is more attractive than Just you know a blog post about oh this is going to be an amazing game No one's seen it anywhere And and you have a lot of control of a direction of the project as opposed to alternatives and stuff and Especially because like you made the first version you you really control where this thing is going It limits a scope like you cannot do a really big game like this because alone You're not going to get to a playable version that will each people just by You know just by yourself And also it can only be applied before development. So it didn't even help to what I wanted to solve Which is a problem. We're still only talking about things that you can do before you start your project. Okay, so Let's see What about project that already exists? Yeah, the attractive. I know that we talked about dating and swiping and Wanting like that people notice us. So In this case, let's say I have a project any kind of project show don't tell I you it's much better to Put screenshots than text. It's much better to to Do we to give examples be nice? I know this sounds very weird But there are communities That the developers are not very nice and it doesn't seem like a very friendly place to be Some of them manage to you know power through it because many people really really really need To work with them and they're like an monopoly like Linux But when you are a small contributor and this is the way to be attractive then be nice and Make scratching as effortless as possible. Let's say someone is insane and they want to contribute to your project There's a really nice metric that Adam Kariv Did which is the time of onboarding finding and fixing an issue end-to-end like if you have a really really weird Framework and you need like to start up VMs and Make dependencies and I don't know what people will just not have enough good will to Remain until that works. They just want to fix something small No one will ever come to your project. Okay. No, no one but usually people Once come to a project wanting to change it end-to-end they will want to fix something small make it easy for them to do this This is also about like language if you thought like oh my god I have an amazing project. Let's do it in huskle or anything like I want to learn this fancy new language Don't do that Pick a language that people know that people people can work with like Czech Godot and basically everything It was said today were in languages that people use Open rough for instances in C sharp and while it's not our favorite language many people know it and they get loads of contributors No, wait, they still doesn't help. I told you what languages to pick and everything So you still have to think about all these things before you start your project So so really I think this is the moral here if you pick the wrong project nothing will help you like you can Try you can walk with what you have but really really When it boils down to it It's a lot of choices that you make in what the project is based on where you where you're going and how you are attractive to other people This is what's going to make or break whether people each about your project or not And wrong project is not about the game Your game idea can be amazing and it can be like really really good, but it's just An unattractive project. It's you cannot convey To anyone you talk to that it is attractive in the Attention-spent they have before they switch to YouTube and the cat videos So really this brings me to my last week The best way and the only real way to double your contributors is find some project that has one Contributor and join it and then it has two contributors and you've double the contributors and It's not a bad idea because There are really really many of this project around there and one of them can be quite interesting and by definition It's it's going to be an attractive project because you picked it so you were attracted to it and Like relationships, you just find something that you makes you happy It's doesn't have to be like the fantasy that you hold about like the perfect game And it doesn't have to be popular anything. You just need to enjoy it yourself So the really cool thing about trick zero you can always do it even if you started the project if even if the project isn't started yet and It teaches you an important life lesson, which is just a bonus And express the love of course because open source is love and we want to do it together I'm a lot quite biased I must say because I've joined an existing project and I haven't worked on any of my own Very crazy ideas for the future that I really really want to start and I will be happy to tell you all about them but they're just like I think that I spent my time quite well and And The project that I work on and I didn't even talk about it. It's called spring It's an RTS engine and it started as a remake of total annihilation back in the day in 2005 I've been a player before becoming a contributor if you see like this these are the exact tricks like this trick zero This is trick one. This is trick Which one was a two and and when I think of how I became I Really went through all these processes that I was talking about So you might say wait this is just like you're trying to stifle my creativity You're painting a very bleak picture of how open source is just uncreative and cannot compete in this manner with With proprietor software, so maybe I am I do think that we are In some ways disadvantaged and if you do really want contributors You have to walk with what you have rather than hope for things that are better. I'm sorry if I disappointed here What is going on oh, yes, I have finished actually really fast Nice, I thought I thought no, it's just really really fast. Anyway, so questions Yeah Yes I Yes, so the question was how you can you do this when even releasing your game is really really hard on your own and Then once even once you released it getting to players and getting them to play your game is going to be quite hard So I think that in general Attracting a place will be simpler than attracting from contributors It's just like look at every community They usually have more pleasant contributors unless they're like entirely dead and they're not even trying to Find players or I don't know what like it's it's in most communities or successful communities I've seen and the majority of people are the players so it's kind of I Understand that it is hard to find place, but this is like the lesser Problem that you get here and now about releasing your game. You are right This is kind of the problem and and it's just like if you pick And you plan your scope accordingly you can do a better that is fun and Like shows promise it doesn't have to be 100% playable, but it should show And give this, you know itching that somebody wants to like I want to see how how it will be when it is done Okay