Basing the creation of someone's net dream on (most often bad) source code has "gone from being seen as necessary (...), to a necessary evil(...)."Stephen001, but why is it seen as such by that many people?
The problem seems simple at first glance.
They fail to create a project from scratch, as they lack knowledge of the language used to achieve this.
The reason for this absence is less obvious and less trivial though.
Short attention span (due to young age) and a low frustration endurance come to mind, but can this topic be really dashed so easily?
BYOND is created for and advertised as simplifying the process of creating certain types of games, so this is the measure that we should apply.
BYOND grants fast visual success compared to languages like C, but the main guide doesn't make much use of this.
Now, how can this be changed?
One main benefit would be a "click and play"-"drag and drop" like interface for BYOND, as seen in a large variety of game creation tools.
But as the attempt would be resource intense, it is logical that the BYOND team can not aim for this direction.
Better tutorials and guiding material would be another way to go.
Not only would new innovative media (such as interactive video) look better, but the quality, sloop of progress and topic could need adjustment (not to talk about completeness even).
A tutorial based on common "tasks" for animé games (like "jutsu") and resulting in a skeleton game is likely attracting more attention than a lot of developer articles.
And again, this is a very resource intense task. Too intense for the BYOND team to tackle on, in fact.
If nothing can be done, is it a lost battle fought by a few determined people?
I would not think so, as both could be done by a group of developers on BYOND.
Outsourcing tasks to a community is a new and successful business strategy that should work here, if people could force themselves to cooperate and work under one official supervisor.
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