Friday, March 26, 2010

OSM HM nr 5 - Wesnoth community

Wesnoth as a game and idea built together by different people all around the world has a strong community. The biggest and strongest part of it is the forum - it contains answers and ideas to many questions and gives a lot of support.
I can see that many members are active and often online - even the chat is handled well. Although the chat wasn't so easy to find.

Simple campaign
The forum provided information but also a really useful tool that our team used - Simple Campaign, with just one scenario, but it had explanations on the wiki pages as well.
Our team tried to find a real tutorial. Although the Simple Campaign that I mentioned above, provides us much help, it didn't answer many questions we had that seemed to be really basic.
There is a webpage Building campaign tutorial, but it has only firs step and second ones like First scenario and First custom unit have no date or guidelines.

If a new person goes to Wensoth page and finds the Create link he/she doens't get information on how to start the development, what are the first steps to actually understand how Wensoth works. I think this Create page should have simple and easy links to tutorials to get more people starting to understand the basis of Wesnoth and get familiar with it, without immediately starting bigger things.

I liked to work with Wensoth code and trying to understand how things work. But in several cases I couldn't find solutions of the ideas I had. Because it was a schoolwork I couldn't forget about it, but I had to continue research together with all the members in our team. But I would have really wanted to get a game creation tutorial, that would have helped me a lot to in the beginning.

Community of Wesnoth
Based on the information that I just wrote about the understanding in forums and not being able to find simple information to get me hooked to play the game or jump in to development I would say the community needs to get itself more open.
I am sure that "old members" don't have any difficulties finding the information they want and need. But today Wesnoth should also think about what to give to "newbies", those that don't have much patience to spend days on trying to figure out how the game goes. It's all about sharing information and building the environment that would create interest in visitors.
So between new developments of new version and scenarios of the Wesnoth game, a small team could spend some time on finishing the tutorials and thinking about making the feeling of the community more open and flexible.

Bugs on the page
This is not so much about the community itself but how frustrating it can be when Forum SEARCH doesn't work. And it happened so many times. We had to use "backdoor" in many occasions, insert searches to Wesnoth forums through Google help.
In this webpage where forum itself provides the most and best answers to questions visitors or users can have, search engine must work, and not provide error notice "try later".

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