[Kde-games-devel] Improving theme authoring for kgoldrunner

[Arturo Silva]

Hello all,

Sorry for not getting back to this sooner.

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.

First off, Ian had asked me if I had any feedback about KGoldRunner in
general and I do have some.
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.

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.

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.  >.<

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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).

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.

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.
And that's really all I have to say.

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.

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.)

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.

I'm sorry if I couldn't be of any help to you in the end.  :(



--Arturo
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