I’d highly suggest changing the guidelines to something slightly more lax. Games with proof-of-concept images or incredibly early dev screenshots I think are totally fine to go into the Ideas & Discussion forum. If a game is being consistently updated through dev screenshots and written updates I can only see it being a detriment to be placed inside the Ideas thread though. You’re immediately limiting the audience by separating games this way so I’d like to see this implemented with more tact.
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Remember, the tortoise wins the race for a reason. Rushing to the finish line will be the death knell to this community if it’s not done correctly.
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‘The Project category is full of dead-ends’
Okay, that’s certainly true.
‘So, we’re turfing everything without a demo and archiving everything’
Wait, what?
So, let’s think about the development process for a moment. Yes, games generally begin with an idea. You come up with some concept and then you want to figure out how to turn that into reality.
Once you actually BEGIN development on a game, you’ve already made a big step between ‘this is what I want to do’, to ‘this is what I am doing’. If you want to call that something else, I can understand that call, but it would be disrespectful to a developer-in-the-making for their ‘idea’ to be treated as such, even if they don’t have a demo, if they’re literally in the process of making one.
So, what do you do? You make a new category: Early Development. Nice, simple, bridges the gap, gives people an indication of how far the project is, without the stigma of being next to ‘I just posted some words about my platonic ideal that I will never actually make.’ There, problem solved. Do you need to mass-archive to implement that? Probably not.
If you are going to archive something, you give the OP advance notice. That is what actual organisations & communities do. That is what a reasonable approach looks like. If you are going to make asking for updates a warnable offense, then you sure better not be punishing developers for not indulging in regular visits.
I was considering joining the moderation team, but I have not seen the improvement in community management thinking since November that I was hoping for.
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As the developer of one of the projects mentions above. I would like to ask, based on what ive read, is this the proper method going forward?
[ 0) My project is archived atm with no demo ready yet so ask for it to be moved to Ideas after all is said and done here?]
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idea so its in the ideas channel
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Working on demo so its im the ideas channel
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We have a demo! Ask to be moved to projects please or create a new post there?
Asking so i know what i need to do when the time comes. Thanks for your time.
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And if I may make a suggestion. You archived my project without warning, which i underatand was due to speed over quality. As far as im aware. I cant make posts on archived projects. I have no way of telling anyone what happened unless they aren’t already in my server for said project. Making a post on projects moved to archived during this time for example “this project was moved to archive during our clean up process. The OP may request reopening once the clean up is done” or something like that so people who see my project and are unaware of this wont just assume I gave up on it would be nice… or allow OPs to post on their own archived projects.
Thanks for your time.
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It will depend on if your project is free or paywalled. I am still working out the details so take what I am going say with a grain of salt as it could change a bit as I work it out.
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For free projects we are just going to be asking for some proof that its more then just an idea. We are going to try to keep the barrier really low so something like a rough GDD or concept art will likely be all we need. The main thing is in the past we had some people make projects when they had an idea or where looking for a team to make it and then it would fall through for one reason or another so we are trying to be more diligent about getting those instances properly sorted into Project Ideas & Discussion or Job Board instead of allowing it to just sit in Projects.
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Paywalled projects will have to be able to show us they have a playable build before being allowed to post. It doesn’t have to be publicly available but we are just wanting to confirm there is at least something there before we allow the post. This is mainly due to concerns from a handful of community members on scams or people taking advantage of the community. We are hoping that this might help alleviate some of those concerns and help us better identify actual scams.
I will be explaining more in my post detailing all the rule changes but we do have concerns on if this is even going to be practical for us to do. If it proves to be to much of a lift for our extend moderation team we will be rolling it back but we figured we would give it a shot just to see if it could help a bit.
I understand some of the motivation for closing old projects comes from complaints about devs taking money with nothing to show for it. But mass closing topics with no warning doesn’t sit right with me.
Would it be possible to create a temp category, move those topics there, and give a one-week warning to post something playable before final closure?
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Its actually a very fair question but I just think its to late for us to change course atm. I am aiming to have everything ready hopefully by next Friday and for sure no latter then the 31st where we open back up regardless.
Its a good idea, but I would rather focus on speed atm. I do know that sucks in the short term though.
I’m confused as to why you’re not taking it into consideration that there’s almost nobody in any of these threads that’s actually in favor of the mass-archiving/closing of threads. I totally understand and am in support of cleaning up the projects tab but this seems like it’s only complicating things further.
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Not to undermine the post before mine but I personally in favor of it. At least now I’ll be confident that if it exists there, there will be something I can try out. Execution could have been a tab better but thats my two cents. Keep up the work mods, look forward to seeing it when its done!
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I too am in favor of separating projects with releases of some kind and ones without, just to be clear.
I’m moreso concerned with how best to separate them without killing visibility. It would be much much better to just have 2 boards, In-Dev Projects and Released Projects. That way it makes it easy for non-dev users to quickly find downloadable games and to maximize the chances for a dev to get downloads. It also keeps discussion easy to find for In-Dev games instead of letting them get lost in the sea of “what if someone made a game with x” posts on the Ideas board.
Also I’m not sure if there was an error on the forum side or if a previous post of mine was deleted but I said in a post I now cannot find that shooting all projects without some form of download into the ideas board hell is just going to reward fast and sloppy AI game production on this website.
AI makes game dev so much faster, and much worse, than if done without so you’d literally be rewarding people to do so. If you commit to the plan you have now people will be rewarded with near-immediate access to being on the much more viewed Projects board if they whip up some AI slop demo instead of taking time to develop and gather feedback from the community.
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Or you just don’t make a post for your project until you have something to show for it. Honestly better that way, cuts down on the “early burnout” projects that never even make it to a playable Alpha.
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I’ve seen plenty games on here go from concept screenshots to fully finished great little games. Sometimes half the reason for using this site is to gather feedback through discussion to get to a playable alpha. Obviously I would prefer project posts to be made with some development already started, hence my suggestion for an In-Dev board to exist separately.
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Yeah, I can agree with that. I don’t love when I click into “Project” posts that are just an idea with maybe a screenshot or two.
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Came back after working on my thesis, only to find my project removed.
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Yeah, it’s jarring, I get that. But it’s not permanent.
Think of it rather as being moved into a holding position during the Cleanup phase, then when that’s done, you and other devs still active request to have your threads relocated to the appropriate subforum as determined by the mod team.
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If you’ve never made a game before, making a post of some kind on a game dev forum (which this ostensibly is) constitutes a better way to iron out kinks in game design early, than learning the hard way and having to start again. I know which I would find more demoralising.
I don’t think that ‘early burnout’ is anything related to that, though. It’s people being too ambitious in trying to execute their ideas without the necessary skillset. Which is not helped imho if there’s nothing between ‘ideas’ and ‘game with demo/proof of concept’
Part of the reason I’m advocating for a new category over whatever this move was supposed to be is that I (and I suspect many others) are more interested in supporting & engaging once the development process begins. I generally ignore the ‘ideas’ category since I have less time for sifting through ideas that don’t interest me these days.
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Having it thought of like that would probably be easier if there was some kind of apology for the disruption caused by an unannounced move executed opaquely, without consultation with those affected.
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I also rarely if ever open the Ideas category. I really think it cannot be stated enough how terrible it would be for visibility to be putting anything there that has real development done on it.
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Agreed. I understand that individually contacting all the thread creators for a “roll call” if you will would have been too onerous, but a blanket, “This is what we’re doing, please don’t be alarmed,” would have been good.
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