Congratulations! I've been closely following and donating (when I can) since your launch.
I'm now unemployed on a sabbatical, and looking to pour my heart into game development. Jumping into such a large, moving project can be intimidating. How can I get started effectively contributing to Bevy?
I'll add, a ton of work seems to be happening in rendering. This is not an area I can contribute or know enough about, but I am able/willing to help with just about everything higher level than that.
We explicitly label easy first issues in our issue tracker: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A.... These should get you up to speed with the contribution process and, at the very minimum, get your feet wet with hacking against the engine, if not dive deeper into various specifics.
I strongly suggest any of the docs issues, as it doesn't require you to write any actual functionality, but forces you to get to know the architecture, the language, and the core parts of the engine itself.
Rendering is definitely moving really fast and we have a lot of accumulated domain expertise in the area now. If you're looking to potentially bootstrap or collaborate on design in a new space: animation or audio both need a lot more love. I'm one of the two animation SMEs and I still am playing catchup to the state of the art.
I'm now unemployed on a sabbatical, and looking to pour my heart into game development. Jumping into such a large, moving project can be intimidating. How can I get started effectively contributing to Bevy?
I'll add, a ton of work seems to be happening in rendering. This is not an area I can contribute or know enough about, but I am able/willing to help with just about everything higher level than that.