<p>Hello all,</p>
<p>Sorry for not getting back to this sooner.</p>
<p>Took me a while to read every single point addressed and I regret I won't be able to reply point-by-point if only because I seriously doubt I will be able to bring anything useful to the table, so I really should keep this brief.</p>
<p>First off, Ian had asked me if I had any feedback about KGoldRunner in general and I do have some.<br>I consider it one of the shining gems of the KDE4 games suite given its size, depth and detail (it has a very complete game editor, and these awesome fading transitions!). Its a fantastic homage to the successfully immortalizes the legendary Lode Runner and one that you should be proud of. It's also replete with very smooth animation and gorgeous artwork, the likes of which could give the 1994 Sierra remake a run for its money.</p>
<p>Admittedly, at least in the version I played, there are two issues that jar me a bit. My mind still blurs between the 1994 Sierra version, and the original Broderbund version I played on my Atari 8-bit, but I don't recall ever being in motion contiuously. Normally that means I simply wouldn't like the mouse control, but I also end up not liking how the keyboard control works either. Granted this does keep you on your toes and is true to the "runner" name, but often I yearn for the guarantee that one small accidental flick of the mouse or a key press that won't register at the right millisecond won't plunge me to my doom. </p>
<p>Also sound was disabled by default and perhaps for good reason as the sounds never played on queue and the game end/over sound is a bit too loud and abrupt. The former might be fixed with the Gluon integration mentioned earlier, the latter I suppose is more my personal taste, but it really would be great if that honk sound could be toned down a bit. >.<</p>
<p>There is a 3rd issue, but its not jarring and doesn't affect me, but I think it does lie at the crux of the problem addressed in this thread. When I play it I never shake off the feeling that it is, at its heart, a desktop game -- one of the most complete I've seen for sure, but ultimately alotted no more love than can be offered to KPat, KAtomic or even the classic minesweeper. That is, the game can be loved and played by all, but only seen as the basis for a modding community by a handful. </p>
<p>As I mentioned earlier, I always assumed [as a user] that KGoldRunner, endowed with tons of levels, 6 excellent themes, quality animation, sound and a very complete menu subsystem, really didn't need any more help, most definitely not in artwork. With only a finite amount of time, this is why my first task here when joining your mailing list was to help out Kolf, since THAT was a project I thought needed a little more love.</p>
<p>But once a desktop game has enough love on the developer end, isn't it only fair to move on to help other desktop game projects? After all, the point of a desktop game has traditionally been as a simple, quick-loading, and above all IMMUTABLE pastime -- if you had hoped for a different opinion from your userbase, then I think that point needs to be advertised so that players won't simply just play and maybe, if you're lucky, occasionally drop in a kind word of appreciation.</p>
<p>In addition, assuming I never joined this mailing list, I wonder if it's entirely clear how I could contribute custom artwork. It took a real leap of faith just to sign on to a mailing list, and I definitely rule out IRC, and neither are particularly good mediums for the display and evaluation of art proposal IMHO. I'm lucky because I already have webspace I can upload my samples too -- otherwise, the 150KB limit would have driven me away eons ago.</p>
<p>And then of course there's always the uncertainty of whether my artwork will be well-received to begin with, and given the number of frames required to draw (~30 per?) I might be hard pressed to go through the aforementioned loops without some guarantee that I put so much love and heart will be used, commented upon and hopefully loved in return. (I imagine coders have a similar dilemma with their programs too, although its been my observation that artists, not always but often, are more fickle and dramatic perhaps owing to the greater subjectivity of the medium.)</p>
<p>For example, I would LOVE to draw an Ubunchu theme for KGoldRunner (and maybe many other KDE games too). But if I'm lucky that any of you know what "Ubunchu" is, then I'm sure you'd be in agreement that its a little too....... specialized....... to be considered as a permanent theme.</p>
<p>If you're willing to open up those kinds of floodgates (and if you've ever seen a M.U.G.E.N. game, you'll know how wild that kind of uncontrollable participation can get), then a system does have to be in place beforehand (not just for KGoldRunner, but perhaps even for all of KDE in general) that promotes not just active, but very easy participation. Easy as in I can see a Help Wanted list of [up-to-date] graphics that need to be drawn, I can see another list of graphics that have already been submitted by other users (complete with comments and grades), and I can upload my own with no more difficulty than a nicely massaged registration process (a la the KDE Bug Tracker). In other words it'd almost be like KDElook.org, only married to the particular application in question, so each application no matter how small can have its own "mini community" of interested users accessible straight from the main menu (as in not needing to navigate to some website just to dig to the relevant section or posts dealing with KGoldRunner). </p>
<p>Even the laziest users I'm sure wouldn't mind participating in a 5 second "love it/hate it" survey if its immediately accessible to them from, say, the Game Over screen. </p>
<p>Well that's my thought on a general infrastructure improvement that's not necessarily tied to KGoldRunner, but that I'm sure it could benefit from tremendously, especially with regards to the matters brought up in this thread that, IMHO, are best conveyed to people who play this day in and out.</p>
<div>And that's really all I have to say.</div>
<div><br>I may be willing to help if you need themes expanded to account for new tiles and monsters (assuming the original authors don't already take care of that for you). But I regret to say I don't think I will add a theme of my own if only because as far as desktop games are concerned, KGoldRunner already has more than enough themes and you're fortunate to have them of this calibre. </div>
<p>Feel free to keep improving it on the programatic end, I won't presume to tell you what to do there. (After all, my definition of speed optimizations is to reduce node count and use visual tricks to imitate high detail in my SVGs (as I tried to do in Kigo), not tweak caching or the settings of QSVGRenderer.)</p>
<p>But as far as artwork is concerned, this seems more of a want than a need, and no offense intended to all the work you've put into this, but speaking only for myself I can only afford to focus on projects that need help with graphics at this time. </p>
<p>I'm sorry if I couldn't be of any help to you in the end. :(</p>
<p> </p>
<p>--Arturo</p>