Notices

Hi fellow game enthusiasts. You may have noticed the new forum sticky. It's the beginning of an effort to make Maemo more of a gamer's paradise. But, it's not finished--not by a long shot: i need your help!

Here's the plan: to make the Games forum here a driver of new and improved gaming experience for the N900 (and in future Maemo devices). There's only so much a forum can do, but let's do it!

Consider this a mini-brainstorm specific just to the organization and management of this subforum.

The problems to address:

1. Maemo is new and small and has limited visibility and appeal to third-party developers.
2. It's difficult for enthusiastic community members of all skillsets to be involved
3. Knowing is half the battle. Collectively we know a lot, but it's not useful without order
4. Documentation is a problem in Maemo and user-friendliness is important in games

Any more that i missed? Share.

Proposed solutions:

1. Organize campaigns around popular games and game studios to promote commercial Maemo game development
2. Deputize volunteers to administer specific forum subprojects and encourage them to recruit and delegate tasks to others
3. Organize group knowledge to make it more useful: maintain a list of available, in development, and potential games for Maemo, and coordinate work on them. This can be in the wiki or in a thread here.
4. Provide and support "official" documentation for all games in Extras (bonus for games in Extras-Testing) by coordinating volunteers. Do the same for games under development, but with a focus on reporting issues and managing feature requests. Easy access to all pages will be through the lists maintained in 3. This can easily be incorporated into a more permanent Maemo documentation mechanism when one is available (there are some in Brainstorm).

We would obviously make use of existing facilities (wiki, talk, bugzilla, garage, extras repositories) as our tools.

So what do i need from you? First of all, refinements to these solutions or alternative solutions, and an idea of the degree of support for this concept. Second, volunteers to implement the solutions (mostly responsible people willing to make and maintain lists or documentation). I am a moderator of Games and also have a few game port projects that still need work. Everyone here has their time constraints and their skills. The proposed solutions can only be done right if done as a community.

Here are a few goals and likely outcomes i see from the above solutions:

• Faster arrival of quality commercial games as developers are made aware of the fanatical customer base of Maemo devices and given quality feedback and assistance
• More and better ports as each aspect of the process, from discovery to testing and documentation, is handled by organised volunteers
• Better awareness of the awesome gaming capabilities of Maemo, bringing more gamers to maemo and more interest from game developers
• A better experience for all gamers as they have quality documentation available
• More and better original games developed by community effort, giving Maemo its own great games

Heh. Like a lead zeppelin... i'm not expecting a Starcraft2 Maemo edition anytime soon. One bump and i'll lay this to rest.

Maybe a more formal way of posting porting prospects would be good. A forum post or a wiki page (wiki would be better to maintain, but a forum post might get more participation) with a list of game suggestions that could be ported, who is working on them if anyone, where they can be found, etc. In a forum thread the starting post could have a well formatted list and instructions for replying with an additon or claiming a port and so on.

As for campaigning for closed source games, having seen how it is with desktop linux I'm not too optimistic. I guess such a thing may have led to a port or two, but I'm not sure and it's always a lot of work with very few results. I'd concentrate on small and indie publishers if doing this.

Keep it alive!

This would be a great role for zerojay if we can get him re-enthused... ArnimS is another perfect candidate

Yeah they are both great for the role but it's volunteers i'm looking for, not appointees.

An immediate task for someone who would like to help out without a daunting commitment of any kind is to make up official thread headers for the games in Extras. Having all the games in the download section point to a homepage thread or wiki on Maemo.org that has a nice presentation and adequate information is a good first step.

Here are examples:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=40954
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=40868
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=40903

You can click "Quote and Reply" on whichever of those is the closest fit for the game in question, and then copy and paste the text into a new thread post and modify it as needed. Look up the licensing information online or in the license or copyright files in the game package. Give concise instructions on how to play. Link to the upstream source. Etc. I have the original large image of the keyboard to make the keymap diagram, if you need it.

I can handle reassigning the thread as needed if you don't want any further involvement.

Please do contact the game maintainer before doing this to make sure you have their approval and input.

This is a great idea I would encourage people to use the wiki for storing info and the forum for discussing. Here is an existing
n900 games wiki page
and I started a Category:Games to hopefully act as a grouping mechanism.

Right. I'm just saying if either or both volunteered, I'd be the last to say no.