I'm interested in what kind of game would be nice to develop in the book? Pong is easy to make and easy to make networked. But that's just plain boring! Cool would be a 2D RPG I guess but that can quite easily grow quite big and not even work as networked.
I'd say a 2D RPG is too complex to develop in 4 month and write a detailed book about it, then again RPG is topic that can possible mean anything.
I would rather keep a look out to some arcade-like game, since they are enjoyable for the widest audience and fairly simple and straight forward to understand and implement. It may be boring yes, but better simple, doable and have a finished and polished game instead of a complex, harder to understand and maybe only a semi-finished game.
I would love for us to be able to do a community book. The problem that arises here is that we typically need a ‘lead writer’ to collate problems, queries and questions that the group may have. It’s a lot of work on our end as well in terms of paperwork. Say you had 10 people in the community willing to write a book, we’d need to draft a contract between 10 people, with the appropriate advance rates and royalties agreed. It’s a lot more complicated than contracting a single author, but in my view the prospect of developing a community title is highly appealing.
We’ve published multiple-author books before, and it is a lot of work from an editorial viewpoint – but if we can then say that this book was written by the SFML community for the SFML community, I think that hard work would pay off. How many people are you thinking of? If we could get 7 people to write a single 25-35 page chapter each, that seems reasonable to me – but then the scope of the book (and what we’d actually do) comes into question.
I like the idea of a community book, but as has been said before, it's very hard to manage and to get a enclosed book...
Anyway he wanted me to ask what you guys would feel about me writing, do I have your support, who wants to participate in this and with what do they want to participate? Is there anyone else than me that feel they got time to write parts to the book? Or do people only feel they want to come with ideas and help out a little?
I'd fully support you and whoever would want to join you.
I'm quite familiar with the graphics module (except shaders) and could help you out there, if needed and I also got some understanding of basics in game development (state handling, resource managment, ...).
Maybe you could contact DevilWithin (or he joins here again too), since he was quite open to writing on it.
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