Merging Marathon - started Saturday Dec 15th. Going to roll into the regular week as we have a lot of stuff to merge after GCI! Keeping an eye out for who is helping (whether providing review, testing PRs, or actually merging things) to optionally hand out prizes (maybe $100/50/25 for the 3 most helpful). Anybody but me would be eligible and I'd handle the evaluation and some Amazon gift cards for the prizes. We're talking a bit about how to even score this and how to keep a gamified scoreboard of sorts in general. So probably best we keep it going a little while anyway, maybe halfway through we'll have an idea about what we're doing! Poke me if you're seriously interested in the prizes so I can keep an eye on activity

of stuff to merge after GCI! Keeping an eye out for who is helping (whether providing review, testing PRs, or actually merging things) to optionally hand out prizes (maybe $100/50/25 for the 3 most helpful). Anybody but me would be eligible and I'd handle the evaluation and some Amazon gift cards for the prizes. Playful Architecture - weekend of Saturday Dec 22nd. Several events that weekend: A play test, hopefully with all the merged stuff. Likely usual time that Saturday (noon US East) An architecture meeting specific to Gestaltabout what to do with it in the future and who can help do what. Please fill outthis Doodle poll if interested A game design meeting for what to focus on in the near to mid-term future. New gameplay templates? Enhance current? Who might like doing what? Topics might includeevolving biomes, ourconstructed language / font, the old game identity thread, and initial ideas for GSOC 2019. Fill out this Doodle poll for that. Note this might be more high level dividing into topics to discuss further later / via forum threads. May flow into further topics after each event based on contributor availability and/or the other topics listed on the Roadmap Trello

Infrastructure Week - actually both weeks around the weekend of Saturday Dec 29th, but may aim for that weekend to do some sort of presentation / social hacking thing on new infrastructure possibilities. Some potential topics: New Jenkins living in a Kubernetes cluster, possibly some enterprise Jenkins / Jenkins X if I can swing that through my employer (trying to focus on similar work during the next 2-3 weeks) Chatbots and various kinds of automation (like the scoreboard thing) Possible CrowdIn replacement for Weblate or at least a major upgrade (it is down again and nightly restarts don't seem to be enough) Improving 3D assets pipeline



GCI has finished as of a few days ago, hooray lots of new stuff and cool students! Prizes won't be announced till early January though, oh the suspenseFinalist evaluation is now in progress, and in just about a month GSOC season begins although we won't know for a while if we'll manage to participate and get in.In the meantime we're going to try something new: a Holiday Hackathon! Usually GCI lasts through the holiday but this year the timing was changed and that period is otherwise idle, where plenty of people often have some free time to put to use. I posted a potential timeline on chat earlier, it goes something like this:I might also try to catch back up with some of the topics from the project birthday which got somewhat sidelined by RL obstacles.Check out the Roadmap board in Trello which now has a Holiday Hackathon list and even subscribe to specific cards there to indicate your interest and please post away / chat about further questions and ideasFinally check out this awesome video put together by our awesome GCI students!