First off, thank you so much for taking the time to check out our project, and even more for thinking about contributing! It's people like you (players and developers) that will make this project great, and we're glad to have you onboard, Pilot.
Vanguard is an ambitious project, and we're happy to have all the help we can get. However, we have some guidelines in place to help ensure mutual respect between you (as a player or contributor) and the developers dedicated to managing and developing the project. We ask that you follow these guidelines to show respect for the development team and their time, and we are committed to reciprocating that respect by addressing issues, fixing bugs, evaluating your changes, and helping you to finalize your pull requests.
We're excited to have you here, and we look forward to your contributions! There are so many ways to contribute—starting with just playing the game! Bugs are a'plenty (recent studies suggest 200 million insects for every human in the world), and we'll need all the help we can get to identify them.
If you have technical or artistic abilities (sound design, level design, 3D modeling or animating, programming, texturing, translating, voice acting, writing, etc.), and would like to contribute, feel free to reach out to one of the maintainers on our Discord and let them know what skills you have. If the project needs your skills right now, then we'll find something that you can work on! If not, then we probably will need your skills at some point (different roles are required in different quantities at different periods of development).
As with any exciting project, there is an overwhelming number of ideas for the project. Unfortunately, since we're a group volunteers we don't have the man(or woman!)power to implement every good idea that comes up. In order to find the best of the best ideas, we've created a workstream to process the community's and the developers' ideas.
You have a great idea for a mechanic. Great! Let it grow a bit before sharing it though. In order to have the highest chance of being added to the game, your idea should be well though-out, and precisely defined. Take some time to distill your idea down into specific mechanics, features, or art pieces that you want to add. Making a post in the Discord about "a cool cluster grenade!" is indeed very cool, but it's not something that we can really work off of. If we're going to put in the effort to seriously consider your idea, we ask that you please put in the effort to create a well thought-out feature proposal. Take some time to think about how your idea would fit into the world, the existing architecture, and most importantly: how and by whom it will be implemented.
Once you've taken your nebulous, abstract idea for cluster grenades and shaped it into a nice, cohesive ball of energy, post your proposal to the #polls channel in the development Discord. Our developers and other qualified stakeholders hang out there regularly, and vote on and discuss ideas and features constantly. The developers know the current state of the game, and have a vision for the direction it should be taken, and are looking for ideas and features that fit into that vision. Unfortunately, due to the sheer volume of ideas that we receive, this is where the vast majority of ideas will lay down their sleepy heads, and rest forever in a shadowy gray grave just out of view (or a bright white grave if you're part of the 5% of the population that prefers light mode). But, since your idea is so fantastic and you got enough support to be considered in a more formal vote setting, welcome to (** drumroll **):
Create a formal, professional pitch for your idea. You'll want it to be detailed enough that developers can understand the full scope of the feature, but concise enough that they won't skip over it entirely—think 5 sentences of text max. If you're suggesting an art-based feature, include some tasty mock-ups, but don't go too crazy. It would be sad if you put 400 hours into your character model to have it rejected here. Send the pitch to Sekyom on Discord with proof that you've made it through the big crucible. Each day we'll compile the ideas into a formal, anonymized poll, and release it at the same time each day for [number of days]. Once the voting period for your feature is up, we will release the results so you can see if your feature made the cut.
Once your molten-hot feature has been confirmed, it will be cast into individual work items and added to the Trello board roadmap (has the analogy broken down yet?). We'll do our best to prioritize work items in a way that produces a logical critical path to release, but if you feel like your feature should be a higher priority than what the maintainers decide, then you're welcome to follow steps 1-3 again, but state very clearly the idea that you think needs to be prioritized, the idea it should be prioritized over, and the reasoning why. Unfortunately, since there is a lot of work to do, it's unlikely that this will change anything unless you have a very good reason (e.g. we made a mistake and X can't be done without Y, but Y is slated to come after X)
We're fully committed to the metalworking analogy at this point, so now we're into hammer and anvil territory. When your item is up for implementation, our developers (or you, if you so desire) will work on implementing your feature, design idea, UI idea, character design, etc. into the game. Once the work is done, a PR will be made, reviewed for quality, and merged into master
. Congratulations, Pilot. Thank you for your service.