Working with other people, who are located all over the world can be difficult at times. But mostly, it’s fun times.

For Eugene “There were ups and downs, we had people join, do a gig and go, some stayed for all these years, some left with a drama, but in overall it was a pleasant experience.”

Paul’s experience is a positive one.

“It’s been fun. Many of the engines I’ve worked on since have been mainly on my one, but a few of the more interesting ones have been in groups.”

He remembers working on the Tinsel engine, the one used for Discworld titles. “There was a larger group of us working on the engine, and it required work to make sure we didn’t end up working at cross-purposes. Even with the original sources, it took us a lot of work to clean up the code and refactor it. Some parts of the video code was even written in assembly, and we had to write new C code from scratch for it.”

Another Paul’s cooperation was also a fun and positive experience. “I’ve also worked on several engines with another co-developer, Strangerke. Those too have been fun, in their own way.”

The unique way of having fun grew from unique challenges that stemmed from porting those engines.

“We worked on the TsAGE engine together, which implements several adventures from Tsunami Media. Each of these games had logic for the games hard-coded into the games’ executables, rather than in the games’ data files. Which meant that re-implementing each game required laboriously disassembling the game scripts for each of the games’ scenes one at a time.”

Ultimately, for Paul, “Having a co-developer helped immensely, as we could encourage each other, share our understanding of how the scripts commonly worked, and compete to finish half of the game each.”

Thanasis also describes working with other members in positive ways. “My experience working with other members of the team is absolutely positive.” He goes even further, explaining that “working on the ScummVM Blade Runner engine specifically is one of the best collaborations I’ve had since I’ve been a software engineer and that is about a sixteen years span. I’m really happy with the quality of the end result on the game [Blade Runner] too.”

Thierry had mostly positive experiences.

“Working with other contributors has been sometimes fun, rewarding, challenging, and frustrating. Communication has been one of the main challenges as most of us don’t know each others personally, and there is a lot of scope for misunderstanding when communicating mostly by writing (emails, chats, bug tracker, pull requests, …).”

One of his remarks puts into perspective the uniqueness of working on a project that has developers from all over the world. “You also need to deal with cultural differences as the project as developers from all around the world, and with strong characters. So it has been quite different from my day job working in an open space with my colleagues right next to me, and I have learned a lot.”

Despite some negative experiences, Thierry grew as a person while working on ScummVM.

The project also allowed him to learn a lot of new stuff. “Since my background is actually not in computer science, and the ScummVM project is one that can be quite technical, I have learned a lot in software development, reverse engineering, and quirks of exotic platforms as well.”