It's practically dead. There's only one engineer working on it, and from the trello board, it's like 1% done.
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I was interested in helping out before, spoke with some folks in Discord. I also gave feedback on how they can make the project more friendly to onboard. I'm not sure if getting more people is actually a priority since there has been zero changes to the GitHub README since I last spoke with the folks who worked on the mod rework.
I gave the guys several examples of how to make the mod actually up to standards in today's open source, including a basic "Getting Started" section for people to compile the game and help contribute.
Any engineer who has professional experience will know what I mean. Here is one
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, that is probably the most popular frontend framework in the world. Here's another one:
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. Here is RENPY's own contribution guide / how to:
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So while the bottle neck is indeed lack of "coders", it seems to me there is no initiative to make it easier for "coders" to work.