How to Contribute

The FreeCol-team is always looking for new people who would like to contribute to our volunteer-based project. No matter what your areas of interests are, we can make use of your skills.

This is a list of whom to contact if you want to participate:

Programming:

 
We can always make use of skilled programmers wanting to either submit patches or fully participate in the development of the game. If you are interested in contributing, the usual procedure is:
  • Subscribe to the developer mailing list so you can see what happening/being discussed
  • Pick something to work on and send patches to the mailing list
    • Start small until you have a broad familiarity with the codebase
    • Bugfixes are preferred over new functionality
    • The AI code is notoriously tricky and not recommended for starting projects
  • After <small number> of useful patches, people tend to get added to the project, with write commit privilege.

Please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Graphics:

 
You can help develop the visual appearance of the game by making terrain graphics, background images and illustrations. Use your creativity and help define the graphical appearance of the game.  For example, we are still missing attack animations for some units.

Please just ask the developers if you need changes to the code in order to support new types of graphics. We could easily add support for new types of animations, code for dynamically generating images based on different parts (like alpha masks) and most other stuff you would need.

Please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or Our Forum

Music and Sound Effects:

 
We are still missing lots of sound effects on various actions in FreeCol. In addition, adding new types of sound effects is quite easy in the code -- so please just ask the developers if you want to be able to play a sound effect (or music) on a new type of event.

You can help getting more sound effects for FreeCol by making them yourself, or by finding appropriate sound effects in places like OpenGameArt.

Please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or Our Forum

Content Writers:

 
Add historical facts and write texts that truly defines the complete gaming experience. Learn more about American history and share your knowledge in an exciting manner. 

The lists of native settlement names would benefit from attention from someone who actually knows something about native American history.

Please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Translations:

  Introduce the game to a larger audience by translating it to your native tongue. We need your help with both translation and proofreading.

Read more and start translating at Translatewiki.

Website:

  Please email the Developer or Website Mailing lists linked on this page if you would like to help improve the website. We could especially use your help if you are skilled in one or more of these areas:
  • Writing content (how-tos, news etc)
  • Webdesign (HTML, CSS)
  • Graphic Design
  • Human-computer interaction
Feel free to join the discussions on the This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Testing:

  We need people for constant testing of the development version of the game. You can get the automatically built development version. Submit bug reports whenever you experience any problems. It would be great if you could target your testing towards new features, but we also need people for overall game testing.

If you want to be testing the game over extended periods of time, we recommend you get FreeCol using Git and build the game yourself.

Start testing immediately! Questions can be directed to the This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .