Eshed Shaham

The Spring RTS Engine has been in active development since 2005. In the past few years, two of its games, Evolution RTS and Zero-K, have been released on Steam. The journey to these releases was long and difficult. Let's regale ourselves with tales of the adventures of the devs, learn many things that you shouldn't do, and also learn what to do in case you've already done what you shouldn't have.

For some arcane reason contributors spend their precious time on open source game projects. Why do they do this? And more importantly: What can you do to make them do it on your project?

FOSS game projects live on the motivation of their contributors. This motivation usually consists of two parts: The desire to contribute to FOSS game development in general and the desire to contribute to a specific project. While the former is very interesting to discuss, our ability to affect it is negligible. Thankfully, the control of the latter is definitely possible, and it is crucial to the survival of our projects. In this talk we will analyse different characteristics of FOSS game projects with regards to contributor recruitment and retention. We will try to present practical steps to lower the risk of your current or future projects dying to inactivity and obscurity.