Does anybody out there teach or train? Or have a dev group or a support network a beginner like me, or others, could butt into?
I’d be happy to pay it back somehow. I’d love to be an apprentice for someone’s Downstream or help in either tedious aspects, or doing a job someone isn’t filling already, like a pixel artist, guide writer, lore writer, game designer, ect.
My background is that I already know the following:
I know how to Code
I’ve made a few PRs for SS14
I’ve read through much of the Dev Wiki, poked around Github, poked around on Rider
Have some previous dev experience with Godot and other unrelated SS14 Projects
Someday I would like to try my hand at making a game in Robust Engine and/or making significant original content on my own personal downstream projects. I’m sure that’s all a bit beyond me right now, but I want to get to that point.
I would be happy to either add someone or join a server on Discord or Telegram if there’s anything like that out there.
(And yes, I already know about the # development and #howdoicode sections of the SS14 server, but I feel like there’s only so much teaching you can get from strangers at a time.)
I am a fork maintainer, although I don’t really teach/train people as I do not have enough free time for that. Also, I can only really speak to the code side as I am not an artist.
My recommendation is that you just pick something small to work on and figure out how things work as you go along. Based on what you have said I don’t think you would be jumping in over your head. Working on a large project is not really something that can be taught from my experience- you kind of just need to dive in. Don’t expect to understand everything about the codebase. I don’t think it is physically possible to understand everything.
Some general advice is to make liberal use of grep and the search feature of rider (double shift by default I think). I often find it useful to search for strings that are shown to the user when I am starting on a new codebase. Another thing is the ‘go to usages’ feature (and ctrl+click in general) is useful for seeing how something without any documentation is used.
Wizden does most development on discord, so I still recommend you ask in their discord if you have questions because I think the only person who uses the forums for anything other than ban appeals is deltanedas.