Hello! I’m somewhat new here, but I’ve posted a few times (I did get a little “new user” badge… felt like Christmas morning). I’ve got a question about helping the game. I love the idea of Thrive and I love what I’ve played of it, so I’m interested in contributing to its development in some way. My strongest skill is in writing, specifically technical writing. However, that doesn’t cleanly fit into the categories I see with the main development teams, so, I have some quick questions about if and how I can help.
I did see a quick mention on the Thrive Developer Wiki about how a technical writer could help. However, it just basically says “add to the wiki”. Which wiki? The community wiki or the developer wiki? Sorry if the answer to that question is somewhere on the two wikis.
Is there any way that I can help outside of the wikis?
Is there even any need for help with writing?
If there’s somewhere better for me to ask this question, please let me know.
Thanks!
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Lipovomit
(A lone Slugcat who lost their family.)
2
I have been helping by tending to the community wiki. In fact, i have been solely responsible for its upkeep. But now i have nothing more to give. Maybe you could tend to the wiki too?
As suggested above, working with the wiki can help. Though, now that we have the Thriveopedia implemented, there certainly is a pretty significant feature which requires a good of technical information. It is intended to have links to a lot of the science behind Thrive, some general statistics about a playthrough, and other related things. It still needs a decent amount of thought dedicated to the organization of information too, so there’s plenty of room for creativity too.
I’ll bring it up with the other developers since like you said it might be hard to fit that into a specific “category” of the existing work we have right now. For now though, if you feel that a tutorial is lacking or something - or really, anything else, even if it doesn’t have to do with writing - do bring it up on the forums. Our performance metric is feedback.
We did add an entirely new team for testing. We could do the same thing for like writers. Kind of the biggest hurdle I see is that a technical writer needs to communicate with all other teams to make sure the writing has good science in it and fits in the game. A big problem recently, and I guess also for years now, is that new members have difficult time getting started when everything is working a certain way and most teams don’t have active team leads to guide new members that closely. That problem will be worse for trying to establish a new team.