This community serves a few purposes - to allow comments and discussions about the course material for the knowledgebase wiki, for students to showcase their work, to facilitate a recruitment section, and for the game development alliance.
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The game developer alliance is a semi-automated open community-orientated online infrastructure that is designed to rank and categorise developers and projects democratically, via a meritocracy, to ensure the highest probability that the most reliable and skilled members will be able to form teams with other best-suited colleagues and work on realising the most desired and promising projects the community can possibly produce.
The mission of the alliance is to form such teams that may then later depart it and become functioning professional development studios working on successful commercial projects, while hopefully still leaving those members active in the community with a higher rank, to then help moderate the projects and its newer participants. The aim is to get the right people working on the right projects, with a focus on professional collaboration and active development, and minimised or even nullified toxicity, pretentions and infinite ranting that may plague other communities, due to safeguards built directly into the infrastructure at a fundamental level, right from the moment of registration and profile creation.
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- Community categorised by active projects, proposed developments, game-related and completely off-topic, with very clear and strict rules about where to post and how.
- Projects categorised by popularity versus feasibility.
- Developers categorised by skills, portfolio, efficiency/reliability and participation.
- Members qualifed by a ranking system accompanied by badges indicating specific qualities.
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All ranking, of both members and projects, is weighted against the qualification of those applying ranks versus the consensus of the community majority, with careful safeguards against sock-puppet accounts that may attempt to game the system to their own advantage.
Members are then able to use the ranking and qualifiers to exchange skills (trading hours of labour, preferably governed by real-time conferencing, public or not) with other members for any projects, regardless of community or commercial status, as a further qualifier to rank within the community, and as a further safeguard against cheating its members and projects.
The community encourages higher-ranked members to have a fully transparent working environment, including streaming the development process, releasing audio and video of collaborations, sharing useable resources, public testing of alpha releases, and meeting for a weekly/fortnightly podcast to discuss the projects and community, for the benefit of everyone. All of these activities can be used as qualifiers in the ranking system of members.
Ranks and specific qualities ("badges") are initially determined by proveable skills and experience, and increased by active development and its usefulness, and by participation and its demeanour. A highly-skilled but non-collaborative member with a poor demeanour will likely rank about as well as a lesser-skilled member who shows enthusiasm for participation and progress, and eagerness to perpetuate a healthy development environment and community.
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