We need more players... we need more steam!

The original, free Ace of Spades game powered by the Voxlap engine. Known as “Classic,” 0.75, 0.76, and all 0.x versions. Created by Ben Aksoy.
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a girl
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So I've been mostly absent from the community for the last couple of years, but I just jumped back in the game and the old nastalgia kicked in.

However, I'm heartbroken that there is only 1 server that is reliably full/active 24/7 (aloha babel). We need fresh blood. We need an audience... we need direction.

Then I got thinking... what would it take to get the Build&Shoot community on steam?

Thanks to the hard work put into the OpenSpades project, we now have a beautiful opensource client to work with.
We have a solid community backing the project.
We have an open source game that just needs the opportunity to shine!

So I started looking into Steam Greenlight... basically a way to submit a project to steam for community review.
http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/brow ... n=concepts

My question is, what do we need to make this happen?

My thoughts:
1. A server that isn't capped at 32 players or 512x512x64 maps and is free from any potential property claims from Jagex
2. A catchy name and logo. Build & Shoot works, but potentially improvable?
3. Some sick looking trailer videos.
4. $100 cash for the steam submission

And finally, how can I help make this happen? We have a community, we have talent... but we don't have unity or direction.

Can we get a standarized client distributed to draw people into the community where they can then appreciate the diversity that opensource has to offer?
a girl
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Another thought:

What if we maintained OpenSpades as the dev version of the game... but fork it with a BnS branded (vote on the branding/logo) and start distributing that. The fork would obviously need to be kept up to date with commits to openspades.

The re-branding of openspades would simply be to entice more people to try out the game and would be the 'face' of the community.

We could then submit it to steam greenlight, with some nice video, lots of nice opensource stuff to say about it, then put download links for people to try out the game in our community.

Even if the submission isn't accepted, it's still a great way to gain fresh blood in the community until the point that we can get BnS distributed by steam.
Lincent
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Unfortunately JaGex bought the rights Ace of Spades and Ace of Spades is already on steam.
So if YVT or other Openspade devs were to put Openspades on steam it will have to be re-branded, re-named, and re-modeled.
There is probably more to it than that as well, for instance how are we going to get people to vote it up?

Ignoring those issues; I think this is a great idea.
a girl
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re-branded and re-named isn't hard... Jagex owns Ace of Spaces... we've long known that... a new logo won't be hard for this community other than getting an official vote on it.

Remodeling isn't entirely necessary?? I could be wrong, but according to my understanding, if the code isn't owned by Jagex, they can't stop us.

As long as OpenSpades has no code from .75 (the whole point of it was so that it didn't) and the name is different along with a different logo, it really isn't infringing on their rights.

As far as I know, Jagex doesn't own the rights to the server software, but I could be wrong there.

I honestly don't see why we can't have a community run and built game on Steam... we'd obviously need a person that is trusted by the community to interface with steam (ie. handle the steam account and push updates). That might be the trickiest part... we'd have to throw up a vote.
danhezee
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Just a reminder, I dont hold any official position within the community anymore so this is only an opinion.

Saying that, if BuildandShoot.com was the community for a game called Build and Shoot, things would be so much easier to explain. The easier it is to explain, the easier it would be for the community to grow. Make things as intuitive as possible. Right now getting a new person, especially if there is no one to hold there hand and tell them step by step what to do like a friend, to come here and then play the game has so many hoops to jump through. And I assume with every hoop jump you lose a pretty high percentage of potential community members.

Lets break it down. Your new and you arrive at the landing page, there is a sever list. In small text there is an explanation saying you need to actually install the game first. But who is going to read that, so they click a link and and you get a message about something not being right. Maybe then you might look around and see you need to download something. But I would image we lost 10s of thousands of potential players once they got that error message. Especially if they didnt understand the error message, they err'd on the side of cation and left. But you find the download page, now you have option 1 and option 2. I think the explanation of both options are well written and direct and to the point. But really there should one option. Or for the sake of staying true the original purpose of the site, keeping the old version alive. Have one Big Flashy Official Download and lower down the page have links to the other things supported on the site.

I have had a lot of conversions over the years explaining Build and Shoot to people who arent in community and it takes like 10 minutes before someone kinda gets it. And really they usually just walk away knowing it is complicated and confusing. I would say the complicated mess that is explaining BnS is part of the charm but explain it to someone you know and see if they are interested in coming here and checking it out. It is an interesting conversation but no one wants to dive in and try it after hearing all the complexities of the story.

I said all that to say this, a steam version if you could get all the people who could make that happen to agree would make everything easier for new player. They could just download and play right away and maybe they could learn the history and other mess at their own speed.
a girl
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I completely agree

We need a gateway... a face... something that is click and play.

Steam is very good at doing that.

So, official proposal:
Fork OpenSpades and rebrand it Build and Shoot
Submit it to Steam Greenlight
Update Build and Shoot with any updates to OpenSpades every month or so.

Even in Greenlight, if there's a link to a download to try it out, people are gonna try it out. OpenSpades is solid in that if it runs, you're gonna see an active server list and you've already got your foot in the door.

We'll need obvious links to Windows, Mac and even a Linux build or two.

The community has indeed suffered from having the very name of their game yanked out from under them. It also doesn't help that an official version is impossible if you want it open source. People will alwaysy bicker about which version should be on top.

Honestly, OpenSpades is the only real contender for any new comers as it is mature enough to be somewhat appealing and at the same time, compatible with our plethora of servers that are sitting empty. However, it needs a re-branding to be our face.

Once we get some more traffic on the servers, there will be more interest in developing the game further... inevitably, more forks will be made and we can decide on which version to maintain as the steam facing version.
[DI]Dwin
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i'll help you , first , change your tittle into : we need more players ... we need more STREAMS , i don't think steam or whatever as platform will help Bns , the only thing that could help us would be an amout of players streaming on twitch/youtube on build and shoot.
LeFizzy
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Nice to see that someone still believes in the future of this game. I hope you succeed in the "your plan " but I don't see great things in it. Already we hear almost three years ago only to re supposed to "revive the game" but nothing happened. I bet, to put it on Steam, because, if I think like a prospective player, a game with good graphics so I just get a try of it. @Keep up the good work with it.
Lincent
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I have a new logo in the works here is a preview.
Image
Any ideas for replacing the models?
Dare
3 Years of Ace of Spades
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a girl wrote:
So I've been mostly absent from the community for the last couple of years, but I just jumped back in the game and the old nastalgia kicked in.

However, I'm heartbroken that there is only 1 server that is reliably full/active 24/7 (aloha babel). We need fresh blood. We need an audience... we need direction.

Then I got thinking... what would it take to get the Build&Shoot community on steam?

Thanks to the hard work put into the OpenSpades project, we now have a beautiful opensource client to work with.
We have a solid community backing the project.
We have an open source game that just needs the opportunity to shine!

So I started looking into Steam Greenlight... basically a way to submit a project to steam for community review.
http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/brow ... n=concepts

My question is, what do we need to make this happen?

My thoughts:
1. A server that isn't capped at 32 players or 512x512x64 maps and is free from any potential property claims from Jagex
2. A catchy name and logo. Build & Shoot works, but potentially improvable?
3. Some sick looking trailer videos.
4. $100 cash for the steam submission

And finally, how can I help make this happen? We have a community, we have talent... but we don't have unity or direction.

Can we get a standarized client distributed to draw people into the community where they can then appreciate the diversity that opensource has to offer?
I'll try to write here a relevant opinion on this.
I'm writing here after several months of my absence here.
Yes, I would definitely like this idea to revive AoS on Steam if it would be possible. The main problem of Aos however, as do I see it is, that the game isn't being updated.
If you look at all the other games that are "trending" on Steam, some of those are really simple games like Aos. The creators of the game still update the game from time to time. The last playable version of Aos, besides Openspades is 0.76. The update wasn't so massive and the new servers weren't that popular.
So the main problem is, IMO, that the game won't get any new update from the creator and the other clones of this game don't have much chance to get any attention from a gaming community.

2 years ago, this website was quite popular I'd say, people were visiting it a lot. Lot of people were around saying that Jagex and Steam version sucks, etc. But then, I don't know exactly what happened, it just kind of worn out. There was no new impulse to keep the community together, there were some events for the "insiders" but again, it was a little thing.
Additionally, there were two different servers, aloha and Buildandshoot that weren't cooperating much. For me it felt like B&S is a competition for aloha. The people from the servers knew each other but there were two different communities. The Aos was divided to people who play on aloha and who play via Buildandshoot.
Maybe I went a bit offtopic but this is how do I see it.

And yes, I still like the game, because I found some friends thanks to this community and I had a lot of fun playing it.
a girl
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It's a chicken and egg scenario to be sure... no community member wants to write code for a dead game. People want to contribute to a game that's going to be played.

I wrote a couple of neat scripts last year that nobody is using? Why should I write more?

I think yvt and learn_more and any decent programmers are done investing time into a dead project. They obviously cared about the game and community, but the payoff isn't there.

If we post the game on steam, that's an immediate bump in traffic... maybe small, maybe HUGE. The point is, there are a lot more people searching steam for new games to try than there are people that google "first person shooter like minecraft" (I think that was how I found AoS).

If you get people playing the game and get some growth, you will have people willing to contribute to it. Heck, when you get new players, there is always a chance they like to code and would like to add to the game.

Without a radical change, this site will slowly get darker and darker. We still have a player base to give us the rep we need on steam, but it's shrinking by the month.

@StackOverflow
opinion?
Lincent
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Dare[AoS] wrote:
I'll try to write here a relevant opinion on this.
I'm writing here after several months of my absence here.
Yes, I would definitely like this idea to revive AoS on Steam if it would be possible. The main problem of Aos however, as do I see it is, that the game isn't being updated.
If you look at all the other games that are "trending" on Steam, some of those are really simple games like Aos. The creators of the game still update the game from time to time. The last playable version of Aos, besides Openspades is 0.76. The update wasn't so massive and the new servers weren't that popular.
So the main problem is, IMO, that the game won't get any new update from the creator and the other clones of this game don't have much chance to get any attention from a gaming community.

2 years ago, this website was quite popular I'd say, people were visiting it a lot. Lot of people were around saying that Jagex and Steam version sucks, etc. But then, I don't know exactly what happened, it just kind of worn out. There was no new impulse to keep the community together, there were some events for the "insiders" but again, it was a little thing.
Additionally, there were two different servers, aloha and Buildandshoot that weren't cooperating much. For me it felt like B&S is a competition for aloha. The people from the servers knew each other but there were two different communities. The Aos was divided to people who play on aloha and who play via Buildandshoot.
Maybe I went a bit offtopic but this is how do I see it.

And yes, I still like the game, because I found some friends thanks to this community and I had a lot of fun playing it.
Openspades on steam would be its own unique game with its own modernistic art style wile still following the complex behavior of the original Ace of Spades.
Some people think that updates keep a game going, but people still play card games, sometimes cards look different.
What I mean is that Ace of Spades has a unique concept, and people will still make mods.
Many people think .75 was bad but 3 million people were playing that version contrary to .54.

Just because a game is updated doesn't make it good; just look at all the updates that JaGex made to 1.x that ruined it.

I agree with dan&a girl but where is Izzy on this?
ByteBit
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a girl wrote:
... there is always a chance they like to code and would like to add to the game.
yeah moar haxs
[DI]Dwin
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Lincent wrote:
where is Izzy on this?
ded
epicfacethe3rd
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Iceball.
that's all I’m saying. here's why:
if anyone were to actually get the game updated more often, that would solve, like, 99% of our problems. SneakyBastard used to be on the IB irc all the time, and was working on a machine gun. I was working on a tank (until I quit because I know almost no lua). Danny0 and Rakiru were working on god knows what with it. ect. Iceball was something that we could actually work with because it was coded from scratch, not from a set of arbitrary protocols few people could give a shit about. and don't even get me started on if Ben and mat^2 came back. Hell, at this point, I would settle for GM, Lecom, and Rakiru becoming active again.
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