Skip to content

Contribution Guide

Hello and welcome to 07th-Mod! This little guide should help you get around contributing to our project.

First things first, we hope you have already checked our rules. It's only a few of them and they should be pretty easy to follow. This article should let you know a few points about joining and collaborating with us. We really hope you stick around and help us as much as you can!

How do I start collaborating?

We hope you are already familiarized with git. In case you have never used Git before, this little interactive tutorial should get you up and running in 15 minutes.

You can also make changes through the Github web interface, and that is welcome too! This won't require any extra software or command line knowledge and it is pretty straightforward like editing a document.

If you are doing changes directly related to our code (scripts, .dll and even plain text like this), we highly recommend you to learn how to do pull requests. It's very, very simple and should take only a minute to learn. Check it here, Github will set you up.

We review every pull request before merging them, so please make sure you are committing the right changes. We will most likely accept your changes, but if you made a mistake that should take some time to fix, we will request you to revise your commits and submit it again. In case it's just incompatible, we will have no choice other than denying it.

A few things you can help with

There are lots of things you can help us do and most of them don't even require you to know a programming language in the first place. Check some below:

  • Help we solve open issues

    • Most of them are just people having trouble setting up their game to work with our patch. If you are good with computers, you should be able to help them.

  • Fix script typos, provide translations or add missing voices

    • Fixing typos isn't that hard at all. All you need is a good editor (I like this one. This one is also very popular. And this one should be really good overall). The learning curve shouldn't be that long, and you'll thank me later for learning it. But if you want to fix just an type (this was deliberate), the web interface should be enough.
    • Sometimes we want to add new scenes to the patch that are only available in Japanese. Do you know Japanese? If yes, awesome! We try our best to translate but if you ask me, I doubt we can actually pass as translators. If you are good at it, we really need your help!
    • Missing voices is actually a big issue in the game. Sometimes we just can't find the right voice because of censorship or script changes. But if you find something that is a perfect fit (or maybe even really close), add that to the game!

  • Add new features to the game

    • We're always trying to make the patches closer and closer to their consoles counterparts. If you have a pretty good knowledge of the engines and programming, maybe you can help us get even closer to it. Hop in the issues section and open something with the enhancement label. We will love it the most when you already have something to show, but if you are a computer monster you can even make a pull request directly. Just don't forget to properly document it so we know what you did there.

  • Squish all the bugs

    • Sometimes we just forget to put the brackets in the right place. If you find something like that when playing, how about trying to fix it? Check the editors a few lines above. Sometimes when the issue is too messy or you just don't know exactly how to fix it, just report it. Reporting is good and encouraged.

  • Improve the graphics

    • It's not a voice and graphics patch without the graphics. If you are good at Photoshop, Illustrator or anything that can improve the patch, let us know.

Adding translations to the project

We directly endorse and want to help translations get the spotlight. Unfortunately, we can't bundle them in our project to avoid incompatibility, so we're sticking to English and Japanese always. But if you made a translation to [insert language here], please let us know. We can feature it on our wiki at the Getting started section for Higurashi or Umineko. It doesn't even need to be finished to be added, as long as it is active we will add it.

Can you feature my fork?

If you made a fork that is different from our project and feel like more people should know about it, please let us know. We'll take a look at the fork and make sure it gets some love. It will be really helpful if your fork has proper documentation (just a well-written readme will do).

I want the member tag, how and when will I get it?

Well, we don't exactly give writing permissions for free. At first, everyone currently holding this tag had to work towards getting it. This tag means we trust you to make changes in the repository and make sure you will not break it or do anything that should hurt the project. For that reason, we always ask collaborators to be active in the community, help solving issues and further developing the patch. After some time, you should receive an invite to officially join the group.

Will my work be credited?

Yes, it will. Any contributions will be credited, though we have a hard time keeping track of every contribution. In case you do a collaboration that you feel you deserve to be credited for, it will help a lot to just make the change in the readme yourself.