That’s right. You! I have been running this project as primarily a one-man shop up till now. I have had some contributions to various aspects of the project: art contributions here and there, some code to add a small feature, or just simple feedback from users on broken aspects of the engine. It has been valuable for me to have that input from the outside, reminding me that I am not merely tinkering with crazy code for my own enjoyment. Without it, I doubt PyWright would have made it this far.
But I’ve never solicited help, or organized tasks for third parties (i.e. not me) to complete. Thanks to the Pezman, who began hounding me first via email, and then over skype and google chat, with a strong wish to aid me, this is changing. Besides working on a tutorial game in the background, and focusing my development efforts on unpolished areas of the engine that I have had a blind eye to, he is also going to organize the community efforts. He started a thread on the backup court-record forum with a clear delineation of tasks, and there has already been quite the response. I am excited to see how these efforts will change the PyWright landscape in the future, improving things which I just haven’t had time for, and maybe freeing me up to look into things I haven’t been able to.
If you are interested, head on over to court-records to see if you fit anywhere. We are looking for people to improve core content, such as sprites, music, and sound effects, to make fangames a little easier to dig into without game authors having to look all over for the initial building blocks. We need clever wrightscript authors to build macros to implement new game features, make current animations more closely match the DS versions, and eliminate redundant coding styles for common behaviors. And eventually, when I have some clear coding tasks more organized, we will be happy to have python programmers contribute additions to the core engine. If you have any of these skills, or even if you don’t, check the thread to see where you might fit!
Finally, just because I am soliciting user contribution, doesn’t mean I am resting on my laurels. The next update will soon be ready. With some important bug fixes, improvements to animation code, and interface changes, it’s something to look forward to! Also, it will be the first viewing of some of the debug tools I have been working on, to easier understand what is going wrong when mistakes are made in wrightscript.