another issue that was bound to come up was our skill level. we simply don’t have the coding knowledge to create a game of this scale while working with 5+ people, online, asynchronously, and without a “true” collaboration environment simultaneously.
so in the end, it came down to both the editor’s ceiling and how we accidentally lowered the ceiling.
scratch tangent
slight tangent, but i feel like scratch has a similar thing. it has a low ceiling (compared to that of, say, unity, unreal, love, etc), but there is a small handful (relative to the size of the community) of people with the skill and knowledge to think “how far can it go?”. people somehow linked scratch to repl.it before (literally no idea how), people have made 3D games, and of course, griffpatch is there. unfortunately, we don’t really have that coding knowledge.
scratch collabs usually look like “ABC makes some assets, DEF gives me some music, GHI makes sound effects, and I make the game itself and credit them in the description of the project”. very rarely would you see 2 people actually coding together on a scratch project. that’s what we’re having here as well.
if this project ever comes to life again, the only way I could see it happening is that one person just makes the whole game reusing assets (provided that they get the permission of course) and asking for new ones. it’s very hard to have 5 pairs of hands on one wick project, we’ve already tried. this is probably the reason the old FF died even faster: we had even more people than right now.
so for now, we may have to shelve this. maybe something changes and it becomes possible again, but it’s unlikely for anything crazy to happen for a while. so i guess thanks to everyone for helping out with this game.
and no, this effort wasn’t just for nothing, hopefully. I’m sure everyone learned something, whether it was about how to code, how to manage code, how to communicate, or-- well-- the limits of wick editor collabs. and this project was fun to try out-- for me at least.
also, nice tree metaphor tryo lol