This week, we’ve evaluated various open source projects to get a sense of what it would be like to contribute to them.

I was able to find some projects that were of interest to me. I’ve liked Cockatrice, the program that let’s play card game over a multiplayer network. Another interesting project was inkscape, the drawing tool. However it was a little hard for me to get a good sense of the project because they use GitLab, which is a platform I don’t have a lot of familiarity in.

Besides those, there are projects that I’ve filled out the evaluation file for. The first one is Godot, the open source game engine that challenges the giants of the industry such as Unity and Unreal. When setting up the development environment, I felt that instructions were pretty clear, however, some of my group members struggled a little bit as they don’t have a lot of experience setting up a C++ development environment.

Well, since Godot is becoming one of the most widely used game engines, there are tons of youtube tutorials that go over the process step by step. In addition the Godot reddit has over 170k subscribers and the discord channel has over 95k members, and last time I’ve checked almost 20k of them were online! This means that with a project of this scale and an active user base, it’s much easier to get answers to your questions.

Another project I’ve looked at was Raylib, which is a library that helps people make games or other graphical applications. Unlike Godot, Raylib doesn’t aim to be very powerful or feature rich, it simply provides a library that people can understand and use easily.

They don’t even have proper documentation, and that’s by design. The idea is that the code should be so simple and self explanatory that all you need is to try to build stuff and learn as you try. The homepage even has the following statement in bold Best way to learn to code is reading code.