Help Make 1.0 the Best It Can Be

The official countdown to 1.0 has begun! Last night we released ppb v1.0b1! We really want 1.0 to be the best release ppb has every had, and so we need your help! You can get yourself a contribution credit (no contribution is too small!) and make ppb better at the same time.

With the release of our beta, we’re in feature freeze, so contributions will be focused on bug fixes, documentation, and examples.

Contributing Examples

We like example code! If there’s a thing you figured out how to do and want to contribute, you can submit a PR with a new example folder. Name the nested folder with the feature set, mechanic, or task you’re showing off. Inside your example folder you can name your assets and scripts whatever you like, but include a README.md to explain how to run your example and what you’re trying to do!

Our expectations are that your example does something different from the other examples, that it runs in every version of Python that ppb supports (we go back to 3.6 right now), and we’d like the code to be readable. We’ll coach you to the last one if something is confusing.

Bug Fixes

Any bugs discovered while testing out ppb should be reported, either to the github issue tracker or to the it-didnt-work channel in the ppb discord. We’ll confirm and mark the issue.

Want to fix bugs? Check out the bug label on the issue tracker. Anything there can be fixed during freeze, and any new bugs surfaced during the process are eligible as well.

Our expectations are tests regarding the error, and the code fix. Otherwise, keep it PEP-8ish and we’re happy to answer questions on the issue or in the #development channel on discord.

Improving the Documentation

This is the big lift: We want to polish our docs. Piper is tasked with a reference guide to discuss the overall ppb architecture and a pong tutorial. Outside of that, we could use how-tos and cookbook entries, other tutorials, and better onboarding documentation for all situations: learning ppb, contributing to ppb, and joining the community.

Tutorials

A tutorial should take between 30 minutes and 4 hours and present a complete working project. By that, we mean a functioning video game you can play. You may reference prerequisites (don’t feel like you need to explain event handling in every tutorial) and only focus on the part of the tutorial you’re going for. Make sure each tutorial has an introduction that explains its goals, what external tools you’ll need, and the basic outline. From there, you may break up your tutorial however you see fit.

If its across multiple pages, please add a subdirectory in the tutorials documentation, just to keep the files nicely ordered.

Cookbook/How-To

We need a lot of these! Anything you might need to do in a game could conceivably have a related how-to article. How-to articles are short. No more than 10-20 minutes to complete, and should show actual code and explanation to do a specific task. For example “How to fix your UI elements to the camera” could be a How-To article.

Cross reference with the API documentation for any built in features you’re using.

In Closing

Don’t worry about getting it right the first time. The maintainers will be glad to help you through the process of hitting the above goals, we just would like to see as much of these done as possible.

And if you’re a new contributor? Don’t forget to add yourself to the CONTRIBUTORS.md file!