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Contributor Guide

Askew edited this page Aug 20, 2024 · 4 revisions

Submission Guidelines and Policies

HDR is open source, and contributions are welcome and highly appreciated! To help those who want to make contributions do so, and to help us ensure that they fit into the vision of the game that we want to make, we want to provide an outline and general process to follow

A submission can focus on anything, ranging from a small change like bugfixes or small tweaks to moves to bigger endeavors like new animations or entirely new mechanics and moves. Submissions focusing on substantial balance changes to characters are discouraged as HDR has its own backroom working on refinements to the game’s balance, but smaller changes are acceptable with proper justification and supervision

The pipeline for submissions is as follows:

  • Proposal: The creator develops the base concept for a set of adjustments to be made and approaches a member of the dev team about it. It can be a draft for an animation, a set of code changes, or a design document; the important thing is to have enough headway made to get a proper idea of the feel and impact of the concept but not enough to where it’s a large setback if it does not get accepted
  • Discussion: Once a proposal is accepted, the creator will get to engage with the team through more direct lines of communication where the details of design and balance can be discussed and refined
  • Submission: After enough discussion has taken place to where everyone is comfortable with the concept, it can be finalized and made into a pull request (see the below section for details). The pull request is available for any user to download either via the HDR launcher or the Github repo and test. Gathering feedback during this stage can be crucial for finding bugs or other potential discoveries, so posting said feedback on the pull request page is highly valuable and encouraged
  • Review: After a certain amount of time has passed for playtesting, the PR will be reviewed by the backroom and either approved or requested for further refinement. Additionally, a member of the dev team also needs to make a code review to ensure that the code submitted follows proper formatting and best practices
  • Merge: Once a backroom review and a code review have both been made, the PR will be merged into the private development version of HDR to undergo further testing and potential adjustment. Upon the next pre-release build or beta release, the changes will be officially available for all to enjoy. Congratulations!

** Note that if a pull request is made without following the above steps first, it will be put into a draft state and marked as needing discussion before it can be considered for review

Pull Request Components

Pull Requests must contain all of the following:

Changelog

  • A detailed and accurate changelog of the adjustments made. For information on how to make changelogs, please refer to the Changelogging section of the guide

Hitbox Comparisons

  • If any hitboxes were adjusted in size and/or position, comparison images of each distinct frame of activity must be shown both The images should be captured in the exact same positions to ensure accuracy in comparison
  • For grounded moves, default spawn position in training room is used unless they hit the opponent, in which case it is better to perform them from the left ledge or one roll's distance backwards Dash attacks should also be performed from ledge position, being buffered the frame after inputting a dash
  • Aerials should be buffered from jumpsquat

Assets

  • If the pull request contains new/modified animations, models, effects, or sounds, they will need to be added to an assets.zip and placed within the description
  • The assets folder should be rooted at the same base level as the normal HDR filesystem; the fighter folder and config.json should be immediately seen when entering the zip file. The file pathing to the assets needs to match that of HDR or they will not be imported correctly when downloading via the launcher