Looking for next steps after completing tutorials

[Stephen_V]

I'm interested in implementing games on BGA on a volunteer basis. Thus far I've gotten my environment set up and have worked through the Reversi and Hearts tutorials, and I'm thinking about what to do next.

1. The tutorials have some bugs and typos. I kept a list of issues I ran into while working through them, and plan to do a fair amount of editing aimed at making things clearer and bug-free, but without changing the overall structure. Since it's a wiki, presumably I can just go ahead with this.

2. I'd like to try implementing an actual game. However, I have no idea whether I'll actually finish it, so I want to have as little impact on others as possible. One issue is that I would like the art files to work with, but very few games have the green "Art files available immediately" icon, and I wouldn't want to make work for the publisher. No doubt the art files already exist for a lot of these games, since some of them are in alpha or beta. For games that no one's working on, is there a way for me to know whether the files are available?

3. I'm interested in fixing some minor bugs in Hadrian's Wall, but it will probably be a while before I'm ready to start touching production code.

[Thalack]

I would pick a game from the available licenses list you are interested in and start working on that. Just make sure to check they are not already on BGA as the list currently has some games on there that have already been implemented. Setup a new project and and use the available button to request the art files. Most of the time the publisher just provides the files they have available and it shouldn't be too much work for them. It's also a good check to see how responsive they are. They are required to give approval for a game to be released so big red flag IMO if it takes too long. I wouldn't worry too much about not finishing it, it happens. It's a volunteer project and you have no obligation to finish it.

Alternatively you could check for games with abandoned projects. You can require read access to the projects files and they might contain the art files. Send the dev of the abandoned project a message beforehand though to check if they intend to continue with it / why it was abandoned. If it's due to a publisher not responding, pick a different one.

Also join the dev discord if you have not done so already.