Google Summer of Code 2008

About Your Organization

  1. What is your Organization's Name? FreedroidRPG
  2. What is your Organization's Homepage? http://www.freedroid.org/
  3. Describe your organization. FreedroidRPG is an isometric 3D role playing game. The gameplay features real time combat inspired from the commercial game Diablo (melee weapons, ranged weapons, "magic" - called programming in FreedroidRPG), but also includes interaction with other non playing characters via rich dialogs, and a unique possibility to take over the enemies through a minigame. We have a storyline that we try to make strong enough to be appealing to people who are more after roleplaying than hack'n'slash. The development team is currently made of three people - one coder, one dialog writer, and one graphist, and we get occasional contributions from many other people. Those notably includes translations in french and german. All of us are volunteers.
  4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating? We are a very reduced team, and our game project needs more people to unleash its full potential. We do have a fully playable and working game, but some improvements we want to do require a larger workforce. The first thing we hope to gain by participating is therefore to get one or two new team members to help us. With more help we could deliver a finished game within one or two years. The second thing is that we have some technical challenges that are interesting to solve, and features to add, that require a fairly important involvement, such as two to three months of full time work. GSoC 2008 appears to be a perfect way to get those things done. One last important point is that we are trying to make our project more notorious, and attract new developers. GSoC offers us the opportunity to train ourselves on welcoming new people in our team, guiding them and keeping the motivation up; also we would be able to learn about the difficulties of newcomers in FreedroidRPG and write proper documentation on those difficult points. We are applying to participate in GSoC 2008 because we think it can be hugely beneficial for our project due to the reasons stated above, and because we think the projects we have to offer match the objectives of GSoC 2008.
  5. Did your organization participate in previous GSoC years? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects. (optional) We have not participated in previous GSoC years.
  6. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (optional) We had not applied in previous GSoC years because we did not feel that FreedroidRPG was ready for it. We now do.
  7. What license does your project use? FreedroidRPG uses the GPL license for everything (code, data, etc.).
  8. URL for your ideas page Our ideas page can be found on our wiki at http://freedroid.sourceforge.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/OpenJobs/OpenJobs
  9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization? Our mailing list is freedroid-discussion AT lists DOT sourceforge DOT net.
  10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization? We rely heavily on IRC for development talk. Our IRC channel is #freedroid on irc.freenode.net.
  11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional) We do not have an application template. We might add a few recommendations about student applications on our ideas page at a later point.
  12. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please enter their Google Account address. We will email them to confirm, your organization will not become active until they respond. (optional) bastian DOT salmela AT gmail DOT com

About Your Mentors

  1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible. Our mentors are the members of the FreedroidRPG development team, as well as one long time friend of the project. All of us (four people) know FreedroidRPG very well and care a lot about making the projects we're proposing for GSoC be a success. We selected people who were willing to help somebody work on their project and who had time to devote to GSoC during the summer.

About The Program

  1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? Should a student disappear during the course of the summer, we would try to contact him again to know what is going on, the objective being not to let someone vanish without him saying "I'm giving up" and maybe explain the reasons, in order to avoid surprises on any side. If a project is given up we will investigate in details what the student has produced - we plan on asking for e-mail weekly progress reports and make sure the student's work is hosted on the Internet, in order to keep track of what is being done - and see what can be used already. If there is valuable code the team will be committed to making good use of it as soon as possible.
  2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? If a mentor disappears we will contact him and remind him of the promise to participate he made to the team. We've been working together for a long time and we know each other well, so there is hope the mentor would reappear after our discussion. If it is not the case another mentor would be able to take over.
  3. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? The students will be asked to join the IRC channel as soon as possible in order to see how we work. We'll also ask them to play the game and read all available documentation, in order for them to fully understand the status of the game and what needs to be done before we can release 1.0. The idea here is to motivate them by encouraging the expression of personal feature ideas. We will also likely ask students to complete and extend the existing documentation before they start coding, which will force them to interact with the community and the codebase, and therefore is a good introductory exercise. During the program, we will ask to see weekly progress reports on the mailing list, so that everybody can read about the progress of the students. We'll also strongly encourage the students to idle on the IRC channel, as it is by far our preferred discussion method. Hopefully students can continue monitoring the IRC channel and mailing list after the project is finished, in order to answer users questions, or maybe fix some bugs from time to time! We are currently thinking about having a booth at FOSDEM'09; students will be invited to help us run the booth.
  4. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes? We will try to select people who are interested in game development, in order to increase the chances of a perfect match between FreedroidRPG and what the students are personally looking for in an open source project. Our objective throughout the summer will be to integrate the students to the decision making process, in order for them to be able to get their views taken into account in the project, which should be a strong motivation factor. We expect that after seeing the game and the progress it will have made during the summer, the students will want to continue helping us on the project, and believe in FreedroidRPG just like their mentors do.