Fundry for Construct Classic development

Hi all,

We tried Fundry for Construct 2 briefly, but decided it wasn't ideal. However, I've set one up for Classic.

Fundry allows you to pledge money towards new features that you want. Once pledges are made, a developer can mark the request complete. Then, pledgers can accept or reject the feature. If they accept, their pledge is paid out; if the majority of pledgers accept, all pledges are paid out. You can read more about how it works here. You can also make straightforward donations.

I think this might help encourage community development of Classic. Developers are volunteers, and they work hard in their own time and generally don't get anything in return. This way, users can encourage the features they want, and developers get extra motivation and some reward for their effort!

Given there are a number of informal developers, I propose that it could work like this:

• everyone can pledge money towards requests - either complete features, or more minor things like bug fixes you really need (which might still be a lot of work)
• developers can 'claim' a request, by posting a comment - the first dev to post has the claim
• once complete with a new build out, the feature is marked complete and pledgers accept/reject
• The Fundry account is registered to Scirra, so pledges are initially paid in to that account - we'll ensure the developer who did the work then receives the money, less paypal fees etc.

This might not be perfect - developers who claim a feature then go inactive could be a problem, for example. However, I think we can probably safely work out any issues if and when they come up. I do think I should state that "Scirra's decision will be final", though, just to pre-empt if any worries do turn up.

I also propose that traditional donations (via PayPal or Fundry) are split:

• 50% to Scirra, for the legacy work done 2007-2011 during "0.x"
• 50% to the new community developers as added incentive.

The only fair way I can think of to share out the 50% going to the community developers is to pay it out in the same proportion as the pledges received so far by each dev. In other words, a donation is half to Scirra, and half a kind of blanket plegde for everything. Does that sound fair?

Click here to visit the Classic Fundry!

Let's run this for a bit and see how it works out. Let me know if you have any thoughts!

Sounds like a really neat way to encourage development for Construct Classic.

And yeah, the 50-50 thing sounds fine too, as Scirra did create Construct from the ground up.

To be clear, about the 50-50 pay being fair, are you asking the other developers or the community in general?

I'm happy to hear anyone's opinion!

This is an excellent idea.

I was going to say you might save some for a Prof-uis license, but I just checked, and jeebus they're expensive.

Anyway yeah some sort of incentive would be nice for the devs.

I don't know how your going to deal with the closed source plugs side of it though.

I mean we haven't had anyone come up with a plug to sell, but I know Lucid is planning on doing one. Not that he should be exempt from donations, because he's already contributed quite a lot, and probably will much more.

As a side note, I think those who release plugins freely need to state the license for using them. It is assumed "do whatever you want" but to have that actually said is a good idea for legal reasons. This is also more important if some paid plugins are added into the mix.

I was going to say you might save some for a Prof-uis license

Plugin and runtime development can be done without a license. It's only for the editor - and even then, you can still edit the code and have another dev build it.