First question: When did you first hear about JMonkeyEngine?

What made me stay with JME was the community.
Actual developers of the engine would respond to my questions,
which was encouraging and made me want to continue with it and contribute back.
A lot of what I know now is down to the fact that people far more educated
in game development than me took the time to share their knowledge.

What were your first steps? Did you install the SDK right away?

I distinctly remember making an infinite-terrain world with a
2-D heightmap and cars.

And I remember some of the first mistakes I made, too:
wondering why adding lights everywhere was slowing down my game
(in a forward-rendering pipeline) and why shadows weren’t realistic
with multiple lights.

I also remember Normen Hansen tutoring me into developing plugins
and improving the SDK.
For me, that was great.
I felt like part of the family, and it was extremely encouraging to
interact with such an intelligent and giving bunch of developers.

I think it’s important to make mistakes to become better at what you do.
We all start with big ideas,
and virtually all come to realize it’s way more difficult than we anticipated.
That’s a learning process we all need to go through.

So my advice would be to keep doing what you’re doing,
but don’t be disheartened by not achieving your goals on the first attempt.
It takes years to become proficient.

Listen to those that know better and try to understand why they came to
that conclusion.

Learning is not always about being right!

Next question: You’re currently JMonkeyEngine’s community manager.
How did that role come about?

When it became apparent that there was a lack of direction,
it rolled around in my head for quite some time.
What could do to improve things?
Did I have it in myself to keep the momentum going?

I’ve managed companies, people, websites, servers, and all things in-between,
but I’ve never managed an open-source project of this size.
You don’t pay people.
You have no definite control over what people do or don’t do.
Instead you have to rely on support, trust, and a rather large dose of
doing it yourself to encourage movement.

It’s very rewarding to work together to keep jMonkey alive
and to see genuine improvement as time goes by.

https://jmonkeystore.com

If I had to choose something other than the store, it would be the
shadows project for my game Animalia.
It took me over a week — probably ten days —
and countless headaches to get it just right, and when it finally worked
it was ultra satisfying to have overcome all the issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfZyf9jG8PI&t=5s

There will also be the option of giving a developer a one-time payment
of the buyers choice — a sort of “buy me a beer” option.
As time goes by, it should bring more users to the community.

We’re about a third of the way to being able to do that.
It’s a very exciting prospect to look forward to!

No bounties will be set until we increase funding.
Right now the funding doesn’t warrant much incentive.
It would only support one bounty every 2-4 months,
which would stall things and probably cause more harm than good.

For now, we are funding the monthly costs of our web presence and services,
paid for by our generous community.

I enjoyed conducting this interview. Thank you for your time.