Allegiance Revival Project

Allegiance Revival Project

As of December 2011 the player numbers are so low, given the 50% player loss throughout 2011, the near-future availability of games is pretty much in doubt. This is Spunkmeyer's idea of how an urgent effort to improve aspects of the game could be implemented to reverse the trend. Most important part is keeping things moving: weekly status updates, rapid release cycles, forced re-assignment on no-progress. Please update the list, however if you are adding stuff that may not show short-term gains, please mark them as low priority. Wanna work on something? Use the discussion area or forums to tell us what you will do. Create a page or thread for your updates. Come back here and regularly update the task's Last Updated field, and link it to your status page.

I realize this isn't perfect - please also improve the structure of the whole thing.

Areas of Focus

SEO

• Create third party content (blog posts etc) around the web to link to the FAO site. Assigned to: Last updated:
• Optimize ranking of FAO content. Assigned to: Last updated:

Marketing materials

• Create a clean, attractive "Allegiance-in-a-nutshell" animation to serve as the new visitor's introduction. Assigned to: Last updated:

Getting the word out there

• Post on forums, game listings, solicit reviews Assigned: Last updated:

Training & Signup streamlining

• Make the training material very, very visible at every stage of the installation as well as on the web-site.
• Develop a system to make 1-on-1 tutoring available on-demand. Assigned to:Fwiffo Last updated:12/30/11
• Analyze and improve every step of the OOB newbie experience by providing more information at appropriate steps. Assigned to: Last updated:

Event Scheduling

• Regularly organize events, with an eye towards maximizing attendance. Assigned to: Last updated:

Non-coding improvements geared towards newbies

• Better Keymaps. Assigned to: Last updated:
• Better HUDs low priority Assigned to: Last updated:

FAZDEV

• Prepare a starter documentation package to get new coders up to speed fast. Assigned to: pkk Last updated: 01/12/11
  • It's already there: Downloading and building the source - No, that's a build guide...I was talking about a guide to the code layout itself, like a more comprehensive version of what Kage already has out there. -Spunky

FAZDEV: Improving the quality of your average game

• Implement pilot AI to serve as stand-in players for newbie comms or help games get to proper sizes. Assigned to: Last updated:
• Implement a single-lobby system covering multiple servers.
• Implement a commander election mechanism
• Implement a forced-matchmaking system low priority

FAZDEV: Learning curve reduction

• Rewrite our training missions to align with our AFS material. Assigned to: Last updated: 12/31/11
  • Presentation mode - see Training mission 1, pretty easy (MDL/images/sound)
  • Interactive mode - see Training mission 6, more complex (C++)
• Code newbie-specific pop-up hint system into the interface. Assigned to: Last updated:
• Analyze how the game concepts & interface could be simplified without reducing gameplay value. Assigned to: Last updated:
• Turn donation into picking a commander. Assigned to: Last updated:

The Can't-Hurt-Now Group

This is a special category of actions previously dismissed due to unwanted side-effects.

• Make forums [s]and wiki[/s] searchable. Assigned to: Last updated: 12/31/11
  • Wiki: Already indexed by Google
  • Forum: Only community index (news) and blogs are readable for guests (people who haven't logged in with account)
    • News are readable via http://news.freeallegiance.org or via RSS
• Implement defections-on as std pick-up game policy. Assigned to: Last updated: