participate

Playing the game

You can play any version of the game you want relatively easily. Just visit the [reviews] page, and click any link in the in the Revision column.

The game is hosted in HTML5 format, which means you should be able to play it on any HTML5-capable browser that allows keyboard input. Keep in mind, however, that in the current implementation, when you save your game (to resume where you left of later), it gets saved on the client, so your saved games are not very portable at this time (although this should be relatively easy to improve).

Reviewing the game

I encourage people who play the game to also post reviews. I suspect people don't want to have to sign up for yet another account system, so the plan is to have you use your SourceForge account to post and receive reviews of modifications. Let's begin by having reviews posted here in the wiki. There is one central page here in the wiki that will be the root for all the [reviews]. It lists all the modifications that authors would like to have reviewed, and links to detail pages where players can see the details of how to play that modification, and post the reviews as comments on the wiki page.

How does editing work?

If you want to jump right in I suggest you start at:

http://iotabuildit.sf.net/

and view the tutorial video. Otherwise proceed to read more about the process and requirements.

My hope is that I have chosen utilities that are easy and friendly enough to use that we minimize the number of people to find it too technical and don't want to participate. The idea is to get a large number of people contributing interesting enhancements and modifications to this game. Unfortunately, the game editing software itself is currently limited to the Windows platform (probably just Windows XP or Windows 7), but I know there are a lot of people out there with access to Windows. So here it is - in order to submit your own modifications, you will likely need 2 pieces of software, a SourceForge account, and the game itself. You can read about the steps here, but it may be easier to just take a look at the tutorial video available on the starting point page. Here's what you need:

1. Scrolling Game Development Kit 2 to edit the game elements, and export the game to playable HTML5 format.
2. TortoiseHg is what's known as a Distributed Version Control System or DVCS client. The "DVCS" part of the term refers to the system by which changes are tracked and shared with others, and the "client" part of the term refers to the fact that TortoiseHg is a means for your computer to interface with the system (via a friendly UI too). More specifically, TortoiseHg is a Mercurial client, and Mercurial is a specific "brand" of DVCS. But I could go on for pages about what the source control system is. All you need to know now is that you need to install TortoiseHg (available at the link above) in order to proceed.
3. Sign up for a SourceForge account so that you have access to certain features of this site (such as posting modifications and reviews).
4. The game itself is an SGDK2 (Scrolling Game Development Kit 2) file, which you will need to load into the IDE and make your modifications. Beyond the SGDK2 file are the HTML, Javascript and other files that are generated by SGDK2 when the project is exported/compiled. The details of that process will be described below, but for now you just need to know that TortoiseHg will be used to retrieve that game code.

Basic Procedure

Now for the details. Hopefully by walking through these steps, it will become clear how you can contribute enhancements and modifications to the game. Because of the wide open nature of the project, it's not practical to demonstrate everything you can do, but once you follow this basic process, hopefully you will be ready to explore a wide range of possible enhancements. This procedure is just for the most basic edits, but hopefully we can eventually post procedures for other things, such as [merging] other users' changes with your own, and more details about the actual [SGDK2] usage.

1. Download Scrolling Game Development Kit 2. The requirements for this program are Windows and .NET 4.0, so make sure you have those installed. Then you can simply extract the contents of the SGDK2 archive wherever you like and run. No need for an installation.
2. Download and install TortoiseHg. This will plug-in to Windows Explorer to make it easy to download and share code and updates.
3. Make your own fork of the iotaBuildIt repository. Navigate to the iotaBuildIt code page (or any other user's repository) and click "Fork" on the left, which will bring you to a page where you can create your own copy of the code over which you have complete control.
4. Before interacting with TortoiseHg for the first time (you only need to do this once), set your user name (which TortoiseHg uses to log in to SourceForge, and by which you will be identified to others who view your changes): Right click on any file in Windows explorer, and select "Global Settings" from the TortoiseHg pop-up menu. Then select "Commit" from the list, and enter your SourceForge name in the "Username" field at the top.
5. Get a local copy of the code by using the TortoiseHg Clone command in Windows Explorer. Right-click on a folder, and select "Clone..." from the TortoiseHg menu. In the "Source" folder, paste the address of the fork you created on SourceForge. This is displayed near the top of the page when viewing your fork of the repository and should start with an "ssh:" and include no spaces. You will be prompted for your SourceForge account password when using the Clone command.
6. After you have the code, you should be able to double-click on the SGDK2 file to open it (if you have run SGDK2 once to allow it to create a file association), or load the SGDK2 file into the IDE with the File-Open command. Then you can run it with the F5 key to play, or use the "Export to HTML5 Code" command from the file menu to see what it works like in a browser. Note: if you want to play the HTML5 code on your desktop, you need to either select the options to export all the code to a single file, or you need to use Internet Explorer, which apparently ignores certain security restrictions preventing image processing from local files. Play around until you find something you want to modify.
7. Use the SGDK2 map editor (for example) to make a change on some map, and then save the updated SGDK2 file. Also be sure to Export the HTML5 code to separate files in the HTML directory so that when the game is hosted, you will see your modifications online. And be sure to save the updated SGDK2 file to keep the HTML and SGDK2 source in sync.
8. Now when you look at the directory in Windows Explorer, you should see icons indicating that certain files have changes. Right-click on the root folder where you cloned the files and select "Hg Commit..." from the context menu. This will merge your changes into your local repository, and allow you so supply a comment describing what you've done.
9. Right-click on the iotaBuildIt root folder again, and this time, select Synchronize from the TortoiseHg pop-up menu.
10. Make sure the address of your forked repository is entered/selected, and click the button to "Push outgoing changesets to remote repository." You will be prompted for a password. Enter you SourceForge user password. (It's also possible to set up an SSH key, but I won't go into the details of that here.)
11. On any SourceForge page, click on your name in the upper right to get to your user page, and then clock on the "(My Project)" link. Click on the "Code" icon to see where your code is hosted in your online repository.
12. Click on "RO" to view a read-only version of the link to your repository. Copy the URL piece of the displayed Read-Only clone command. It will look something like http://hg.code.sf.net/u/bluemonkmn/myiota. Paste this URL in the browser's address bar. You are presented with a history of changes in your repository. Click on the "files" link on one of these changesets, then the "HTML" directory, then the iotaBuildIt.html file. Finally click on the "raw" link at the top right of the page. This is the link to play the selected revision of the game. You can copy the currently displayed URL wherever you want to expose the link to your revision.
13. After getting your link and verifying that it seems to be functioning, then go to the [reviews] page to post your revision for public review. You are encouraged to link your review entry to a full page dedicated yo your revisions, which should describe in more detail how to access your revision and what to admire when playing it.

Origins

You are invited to the discussion forum at http://gamedev.enigmadream.com/index.php?topic=1589.0 to see how this project began and what we are talking about in the process of getting this project off the ground.