Opening Up - Part 1

This week, being very busy, with all kinds of things going on, I decided to talk about something I'm not working on at the moment. I am loaded down with N64 stuff everywhere I look. This post gives me a quick change of subject so I don't go N64 crazy...

Most of you probably know that we started taking resume's recently. Now, you may be wondering what we want volunteer help for. There are actually a number of projects we are looking at taking on. There is always so much to do with CC that we often feel like we are working on the never ending todo list. Because of this we have finally decided to open up some of our projects to the public. (I was actually the one to drag my feet on this. Many of the people involved with CC have wanted us to do this for a long time.)

I present these in no particular order:

First, we need to convert our game info pages over to a Wiki page. There are so many games with so much information that we simply can't handle it all. In fact we can't even start to handle it all. The game info pages have fallen further and further behind. At the moment we don't even have screen shots up for all the games. (That was something we managed to stay on top of for years.) There is simply to much to be done. Especially since, Lord willing, we are about to start adding games like crazy again. If we can get a Wiki setup to handle that then the fan base can help us maintain that information. We all love classic gaming, that's why we're here. Wiki game info pages would allow fans to publish info about the games they love.

Second, the website needs redone. That is something that has to be done every few years. In truth it is long overdue. The site works, but it could be so much more. Again, we just don't have the manpower to do it totally in house right now. The full time staff is working on getting more systems and games out there. We only have so much time. That means the website redesign is going to have to be handled by a third party or by a combination of in house and volunteer help. There are a lot of very artistic web savvy people out there. We want to give fans that have the know how the chance to help us improve the site.

Third, the software we use needs a little work. The emulators we use generally works great, but we need to add features for our fans. For instance, we need to add a multi-player option for all our users. Most of the emulators have some kind of multi-player mode, but we don't have a good way for our fans to get together to play. We would also like to develop some kind of “competition client” where fans could complete head to head while others were watching. If we could manage that we could have our own video game Olympics.

More soon...