a. Get noticed, art contest
b. unless through winning a contest yes. Current UGC members will recommend people
c. No
2. No
3. ? to get in the game? ofc
4. yes or no, both
5. long
6. up to them
I was approached by krathan on discord because people noticed my epic self-taught xml skills and dungeon design and stuff. knowing people in closed testing helps since they can recommend you, but you have to have something worthwhile to contribute to be in UGC. skill in-game isn’t as important as really understanding how the game works and what’s bad or good.
only if you plan on doing that, the UGC team also consists of dedicated artists who just make sprites. some of them know how rotmg’s xml works, but only because they were interested themselves, not because they actually need to know it
I wouldn’t know for sure since I haven’t finished anything yet, but it seems that you work on what you want until it’s ready for prod and then deca adds a couple finishing touches (drop rates and such) and adds it in. I do know that fame gain and drop tables have to be approved by deca, whether or not the dungeon is any good is handled by testers since that’s what they’re there for. obviously deca won’t add anything they don’t want to, but I don’t know of anything they turned down and threw away.
idk about skins.
depends on whether or not you want others helping. usually (I think, I’m still relatively new) one of the xml code monkeys does the dungeon while an artist handles the sprites.
deca doesn’t impose deadlines or anything on creators, we work at our own pace. so sometimes things will get done in a reasonable amount of time, while others stall out because the person working on it has other things to do irl or whatever (cough nest rework cough).
it really depends on how much time you have available to invest in your project. the xml I included with my stone caves of nores dungeon took around 5 months (?) to complete, but part of that was due to me still learning the xml. and that doesn’t even include the testing and debugging that comes after that, it definitely takes time.
I’ve got way too much stuff of my own I want to get done to take requests from other people. I would guess other dungeon creators have similar opinions. sprite artists might be more lenient, you’d have to ask them.
Ahh I see someone has been listening to Deca Debrief!!!
However, I also did mention that the stars were in alignment that day. I do not recommend trying that AT ALL.
The only real way to get into testing is to know testers/UGC.