I see some of projects in the project category that lack critical proof-of-concept info that I feel should become mandatory, such as tagging what game engine the game uses (renpy, rpg-maker, etc) what genre the game is (text adventure, visual novel, etc.) and what the game even looks like (the OP doesn’t even have an in game screenshot).
It’d make finding something new to play a whole lot easier because the engine & genre tags will tell you what you’re in for in those departments before you even open the thread, and when you open the thread, you’ll know that enough work has been put into the game for there to be something visual to show.
23 Likes
I agree! How am I going to get excited about someone’s project if they don’t explain anything about it?
On this very forum, people have made roguelikes and boxing sims in Twine and dating sims in Unity. Unless there’s something about performance/compatibility, game engine doesn’t tell me much. Platforms (Windows, Browser, etc) make more sense to me.
Good shout
The main risk here I think is accidentally discouraging text adventures. You can still screenshot text, but it usually doesn’t screenshot well.
Nice ideas overall.
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I think you bring up a lot of good points, it’s definitely useful to properly label a project for potential player’s. However I don’t think this should be strictly mandatory, just strongly encouraged as some games don’t have enough content ready, or it’s an early stage and the developer may be trying to gather feedback and ideas from the community. And of course a strict format may not be a perfect fit for every game
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Yeah, Text Adventures would be exempt, everyone knows what text looks like, lol
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honestly i agree with everything you’ve said, the lack of categorization and such really makes it difficult to find good games, and also a lack of art in games can be a huge turn off for me (unless you’ve written a damn masterpeice). i also think an aspect that needs to be categorized would be what sub-genre of fats is being used, i.e. stuffing, soft, realistic weight gain, blobs, immobility, inflation (relatively uncommon but i see it enough), etc. there are so many games that start off really good and then the art depicts blobs (which i am not a fan of) and it just feels like i’m wasting my time.
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I was going to express my support of this, but a brief scroll through the projects category shows that the majority of users are tagging their work just fine to the point where I’m not sure it’s necessary to make this an official rule. Certain content tags like blob are kind of ambiguous anyway. I do think a nice idea might be - and I have no idea if this is even possible but I’d like to see it - the ability to set a thumbnail for a given topic, so that people who do have art for their game can display it right on the topic list, which should make it easier to find games with a style you like without having to click through everything in the project list.
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thumbnail is a good idea and i would like it, problem is that it can’t really be used by games that don’t have art in them and runs the risk of obscuring those games. maybe also introduce a snippet feature so you can get a feel for the writing?
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I like the sound of that
The main issue is we do have tools that can enforce tagging but they do not give us to the control to really enforce specific tags. Once we get the main site up this will no longer be an issue though as we are providing tools to filter games without releases.
1 Like