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How to Contribute

First of all: Thanks for your willingness to contribute to Duality. It has grown to be a big project and one developer alone can’t possibly handle all the issues at once.

That said, external contributions are always a double-edged sword, as they introduce a little extra work due to their necessity to be reviewed and potentially edited or merged to fit within the existing framework of the project. This guide aims to help you minimize this extra effort and make your contributions as helpful as possible.

Ways to contribute Back ↑

There are many ways to contribute, some of them disjoint and others heavily integrated into the project. Here’s a quick overview on what you can do, sorted by their difficulty level and the amount of required experience with the project.

For Everyone: Be a Community Wizard Back ↑

This task is probably the one best fitted for new users: If you didn’t do anything with Duality, or just recently discovered it but still want to contribute, this is for you.

As cool as Duality might be, let’s not deceive ourselves here: It’s still the new guy in gamedev town and a lot of older inhabitants prefer to curiously look at it from a distance rather than walk over and say hello. Those brave souls who jump right in and use it for their projects are rare, but maybe the most important contributors there are right now. If you’re reading this, you are probably one of them, and let me tell you this: Duality needs you.

The most important tools of the trade are Duality itself, the Forum, Chat, or any other means you’re personally using to publish things on the internet, say Twitter, a dev blog or similar. Let’s see what you can do:

Learn how to use Duality and ask clever questions. You may be still new, but you can nevertheless be inspiring to others by showing them what’s important to you, or difficult to grasp at first.
Develop some games with Duality. Take part in Game Jams. Use it to create awesome stuff. Or silly stuff. Stuff that is just fun to make, nice to look at or even awesome in its own way.
Help others who are new to Duality or try to do something that you have already done. Answer their clever questions. Show them the way things are done, and ask what they’re trying to do instead of telling them what they shouldn’t. Be inspiring to them.
Write tutorials. Do a making of for YouTube. Blog about it. Enrich the community with inspiration and knowledge.

This might look like a whole lot of work, but really, if you’re even starting to do one of the things, you are already a great help. Be friendly, honest and humble. Let’s build a community together.

For the Independent: Be a Plugin Developer Back ↑

This is one of the easier ways to help, and certainly a very independent one. Compared to big players like Unity, the Duality framework hasn’t seen nearly as much “man hours” of work and thus lacks certain functionality that you might require or wish for. But thankfully, Duality is a very modular framework as well! There’s nothing that stops you from implementing the functionality you need in a distinct Core- or EditorPlugin and then distributing that plugin for others to use. It might feel more like a side-project to Duality instead of actually contributing, but rest assured that this is a task just as vital and helpful as any other, and a lot of Duality’s core functionality is implemented in plugins as well!

So, how do you proceed? Well, this is mostly your own choice, because you’re working in a distinct module that you can shape exactly the way you like. Here are some pointers, though:

Set up a GitHub repository for your module.
Set up a Duality plugin project / solution and push it. In case you need examples on how to do this, you might want to take a look at some minimal examples from the main repository. It’s quite easy - just add a reference to the appropriate Duality Assembly and provide an implementation of the matching Plugin class.
Implement a first prototype.
Publish its binaries and let others know.

For the Advanced: Develop the Framework Back ↑

Congratulations! You have picked the hardest part of them all, but nonetheless one with the highest potential to have a huge impact on all Duality developers. What you are doing is introducing new features, fixes and concepts to the framework that powers it all. It is a very cautious work, and you’ll have to discuss and iterate on all your changes with the dev team to make sure it aligns with existing designs, is reasonably polished and doesn’t cause something else to break. But here comes the good part: It will be worth it when it actually works out.

Now, what do you actually do? Here’s how to start:

Evaluate what exactly you want to do. A good place to start is with an existing issue, something that has already been publicly talked about. Which is a good thing! A fortunate side effect is, that there may already be some thoughts and designs on the topic that you can rely on for your implementation. Be aware that not all issues are a simple grab-and-implement case - some of them might still be in an early discussion phase, or arguable altogether. To guide you through this jungle, there’s the Help Wanted label you can look out for. Issues flagged with this are most likely to benefit from external contributions. If this is your first contribution, also look out for the Good First Issue label! Those have been pre-selected by the team to make sure new contributors don’t get overwhelmed on their first job.
Fork Duality on GitHub.
Branch your fork for this exact task, and nothing else.
Implement it and test it thoroughly.
Submit a Pull Request and hope for the best.

Here are some general tips on your first Pull Request:

Read this: 10 Tips For Better Pull Requests
If you’re working on user interfaces, do usability testing.
Make sure it doesn’t crash and always behaves non-destructive.
Make sure to obey the coding standards that are present throughout Duality. Just look through some code files and make sure your code looks like everything else. You’ll get a feel for it.
In case of new features, check how you addition feels in the overall framework, both regarding code design and usability. If it feels “tacked on”, something is wrong.
Always use Tabs for indentation, but Spaces for alignment.
When in doubt, ask.

All in all, developing the Duality Core may be the trickiest part, mainly because it is the most integral one. It will require a bit of effort to get into how everything works, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start small. Pick something easy at first, then take it from there. You’ll learn, and you’re going to acquire some hands-on experience with Duality before moving on to something bigger. It’s also a good idea to build some small games with Duality first, in order to understand the workflow that comes with it, and the challenges that arise from it.

Ah, and one more thing: If you plan to start working on something, talk to us! If there is an issue you’re going to tackle, post a comment - if there isn’t, create one. Doesn’t take long and might save everyone a lot of time :)