My hope was that choosing to refer to it as "minimalist" would help calibrate people's expectations not to expect to much. I'd be interested in other language or naming that we could use to make that more clear.
This template will indeed become somewhat more featureful over time, but part of the intent is that highly specialized, opinionated, and therefore featureful templates should be built on top of this one (eg a template for an MMORPG). Again, thoughts on better verbiage to make this more clear would be greatly appreciated.
As a primary author of the template, I can offer some insight here. This was originally posted on the Mozilla Labs site, which is one of the ways that we try to offer cues that this is early days and not yet production software. As far as the verb "releasing", I don't have a sense for how better to word a blog post about a 0.1 version of something, but I'm very much open to suggestions.
Other folks have asked for an examples as well, and I'm still struggling with the best way forward here. At the very least, I'm thinking that the next version wants the text from "let's get started" included as well as a screencast demonstrating how one could start off a project (by typing at the command-line). But the reality is that this is a minimalist template that most consists of infrastructure bits (it eases pulling in libraries, building, deploying, modularity, tests, etc.). So it's a bit like the HTML5 boilerplate in the sense that it's not very opinionated -- it's applicable and supports almost any sort of game. So if you have thoughts on the best way to demo and talk about this, I'd love to hear them.
Using the word "release" is fair enough. I wasn't familiar enough with Mozilla Labs when I initially read the post.
I think there are two major reasons why people want to see examples/demos:
The first, is to learn from said open-source example, and see how specific parts of the template/library are integrated.
The second, less obvious reason, is to see if other people are actually using this template at all in the first place. This is important to me as a game developer because I don't want to invest my time into something that's not proven to work.
As minimalist as the template is, having a full game developed using the template would be the ideal example/demo in my book. Not only would it show off what the template could help with, it could also be used as an open-source reference for people interested in game development in general. You could easily have one demo game for each genre of game that might be made using this template.
Do you have any interest in partnering with developers to make demos/examples?
Agreed on both of those reasons. We absolutely are interested in partnering with developers who want to make demos or examples based on this template. If you (or anyone else reading this) is interested, I'd love to hear from you either via email at dmose@mozilla.org or on irc.mozilla.org in #games (I go by dmose there).
