Forum vs Random Discussions
In the past few weeks it felt like makegamessa.com has died down in the amount of "interesting" topics and the same topics to take the top 10. I personally feel there should be a change in the website to make it more productive and get more people to visit.
What I feel should change
* Change it to a forum
* Have a page specifically for COMPLETED games made by South-Africans
* Have a page specifically for games to be tested where other people can give feedback to the creators. This can be under a forum but I feel we need to promote the games made in South Africa as it will also inspire others from starting.
Please let me know if you feel that how it is currently is better and if there is already plans to change it. :)
What I feel should change
* Change it to a forum
* Have a page specifically for COMPLETED games made by South-Africans
* Have a page specifically for games to be tested where other people can give feedback to the creators. This can be under a forum but I feel we need to promote the games made in South Africa as it will also inspire others from starting.
Please let me know if you feel that how it is currently is better and if there is already plans to change it. :)
Comments
It's also really normal to see an uptick in students worried about their future or hoping some game fresh out of high school or uni is going to make them the next Notch. We've gone to great lengths to make MGSA really visible, and to attract people to the site. Thanks to the SEO magic of @Dammit we're pretty much the first site on anything to do with making games in SA. You can google SA Game Dev, and MGSA comes up before sagamedev.com
Keep in mind that MGSA is run by volunteers, and is actually a financial net loss to anyone who is working on the community, since any time that is being devoted here is time that is not being used to make games. I've changed from bullet points to numbers for ease of response
1: I'm not sure what you trying to convey. The website is currently only a forum. Could you please rephrase this to make it a bit more clear :)
2: So basically http://store.steampowered.com/curator/5025202-makegamesSA/ but for all games? I'm not really sure how this would make the website be a more interesting place? We had a wiki which did this a while back, but no one actively maintained it, and it got flooded by spambots.
3: Like say the projects tab?
Also how would you propose that we promote these games? Any promotion of a game is up to it's creators. Like I said above: any time being spent on MGSA is time not on our own games. There isn't that much we can do. Large scale a rather substantial budget. How would we be able to reach the public like Carte Blanche
When I just started out with game development I remember the old make games websites in the time that the guys making Rune's Keep were very active. The things that attracted me the most was the inspiring games that was very easy to see that was made by other South Africans.
(Regarding Forums) When it comes to the "Forum" I feel that this is a very difficult style even tho it has a side bar navigation to certain "categories". When I say forum I meant to say one where you can see under certain categories how many new posts and replies there are. In this one ALL the topics get to the front so I come across topics everyday that I might not be interested in and maybe miss one or two that I do.
One of the websites I visit the most regarding game development is http://www.gamedev.net/index
What keeps me going back there is the following.
[1] REALLY Helpful tutorials, tips and other game related articles on the front page written by the community and approved by moderators. It would be really nice if we could get something like this going as members can volunteer themselves to write articles whenever they get some free time.
[2] You could browse around in the forums much easier to find topics that you looked for
[3]Weekly/Daily (Not sure) screenshots of interesting games busy being made by developers.
I do understand that time is a big concern for makegamessa because they have jobs that pay for their food and also their own personal projects but I would like to discuss or hear the future ideas that they have for the website and how we will be pulling the interest of new developers as well as keep the interest of current members. :)
1. Look for something relevant to me. (takes forever and usually longer than I could be bothered)
2. (half the time) don't find anything relevant quickly, and just wander off, never to return again
3. (other half) find something, and bookmark that page, never see anything else ever again.
MGSA doesn't have the volume of people/content to sustain 10 different sections which never see each other. If I only ever went to prototypes, for example, I'd never see stuff in graphics, events, tutorials, etc. Sure, you can always go and check on those individually, but the nature of people is that they don't. Therefore results 2 and 3 are undesireable.
And if they wanted to, they CAN do that, right now, with the sidebar buttons. Those do exactly the same thing.
Helpful tutorials? We have them, but again, we don't have the volumes of those other major forums you speak of. Finding the correct one is a matter of categorisation, search and discovery, and that's not a problem that can be addressed by breaking into more subforums. http://makegamessa.com/categories/tutorials <--- go look.
You say you could browse around in those forums to find the topic you're looking for. I need an example of that, I can't see the difference between that forest of subforums compared to the category buttons that we have. Could you give us an example of a topic that you'd like to find on our forum, and a preferable way of finding it as opposed to how you might find it now?
Regular screenshots? That's there, as often as people do post them. You want a photo feed of just screenshots? Do other forums have a photo feed? How are you discovering these photos and screenshots of games in other forums that you aren't discovering them here? A solid example would help understanding what you mean.
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I do agree that this site could do with a few changes and updates to make it friendlier to first-time landers, we've been talking about a front page for a long time, and a few good people have given their time towards making it, but that stuff takes time and a lot of people just don't have the time. Or the people that have the time aren't the ones with the authority (mgsa is a body after all, not a wiki) to just make changes. And I'm sure if it were a wiki-like thing there'd be just anarchy and chaos.
So, yeah, we could do with some changes, but I don't see how "changing it have many subforums like other massive forum sites" is better than what we have now.
A page for released games... We should have a sticky on top for this:
http://store.steampowered.com/curator/5025202-makegamesSA/
And maybe maintain a page with mobile titles. But that takes time, would you like to volunteer for that? :)
If you're looking for specific things, there's a search function and there are categories. If you really don't want to see anything else outside a specific category, use that as your bookmark link :)
* Game Development Tutorials
* Articles on their own titles
* Articles on how their sales did for specific games (As guidance for newer guys) The main issue for me is rather that I guess there isn't very specific categories and I didn't really use the sidebar menu. Other forums are nice in a way that on the front page of it you can see all the categories and specifically if there are new articles in all of them instead of opening up each category you are interested in to check for new posts. On the main page of GameDev.net there is a section called "Screenshot Showdown Top Shots" where the best and most interesting looking screenshots of games are displayed every week. Would be a good tool to get interest from people to visit your topics especially when you are a artist or announcing a new game etc. That is very nice but most new guys visiting this website will never see that link.
> So you won't read those things in the tutorials section because they're not called "articles"? Or, did you read then and see that they're not as good as the "articles" that you want? If A, I suggest you look through them, because there are quite a few good things in there, of course, they're not all 100% applicable to you. If B, you're talking about writing articles. That means asking people to take the time to write articles. If you have the time to write them, great. If not, well, then we can't complain that other people aren't doing things of value for free.
Or if you're saying we should change the site to let people publish articles like a blog or something, well, that's something else altogether, and again, people spend their time as they want. Who's gonna write the cool content that you want?
> So you're saying you never use the category buttons because they don't specifically say how many new things are in them? Even if you're interested in a specific category? We could try and get someone to add the functionality of a number tracking how many new things in a category, but if you weren't going to that page, you won't care. If you *were* going to that page, you'd see the new stuff there anyway.
There isn't very specific categories - so, which categories do you suggest that's more specific and better suits your needs?
> Screenshot showdown... Cool, you can do that, if it means so much to you! Noone stops you from doing it!
> Yeah I know, hence I was saying that we could make a sticky of it. As we said, there's been talk of a redesign of a frontpage, and I think a few small changes could be made to the existing top header to incorporate a few things. But they're really not MAJOR enough to warrant blackmailing people for their free time which they aren't getting paid for.
Anyway...
Who has the access to the backend stuff now, if someone does want to donate time towards adding stuff to this site? And which committee do we have to pass the changes through to be voted on?
Also I believe part of @Tuism's post in enquiring as to who has access to the backend might be because they want to donate some of their time to the community. Replaced articles with topics to reduce ambiguity, reordered list to be numbered for ease of response
One of the key decisions when starting the forum was to give it a flat structure. This is more democratic since any topic has the potential to be seen by anyone. If the forum followed a tree style it's quite likely that people would have just passed over this post.
Also in your OP you said there was a lack of content. If part of the forums content was obfuscated then there would be even less things to look at which seems to be against the idea you find problematic in your OP.
1, 2: This is a forum, it's not in the nature of it to be a website that curates a selection of articles for people to read. Members of the community use their own time to go and make posts that are to be read for the benefit of other member much like an article would, but it is not the nature of a forum, particularly this one, to fill the function of a news website.
3: I'm curious as to how useful sales reports and breakdowns are to a new person. There is a lot of data and number being shown, but by large the inference drawn from such posts is dependant on a larger understanding of the game development industry. Like Vlambeer could post how many units they sold during early access with the game at $14.99 and then how many they sold after at $11.99 but the understand of why that price change is significant and the marketability of those numbers means is something that requires a rather nuances understanding of the games sales business. As was pointed out there is a side bar to aid you in searching through particular categories on the forum. I'm not really sure that you are asking for any functionality that isn't already there?
As I said above, keeping the main page open to all topics from all categories makes things more democratic, and allows people to see what is going on in a general sense, which is being shown more things which could be of interest. A while back Ben used to do a weekly prototype roundup and post it on Twitter. Now by your writing of this I can see an obvious problem: best and most interesting looking screenshots. That's not a very democratic approach to sharing the happenings of the forum, and might discourage people who thought they did great work and didn't get featured that week (since encouraging new people is a thing) Just as a note: guys is used when referring to men, it would be better to use folks, people, or some other gender neutral term when addressing a general group
A lot that can be done, and volunteer with little time are two very powerful opposing forces. I hope you take a moment to appreciate that. We have a relatively small group of people who volunteer to run community things. Yes there is room to improve things, but just maintaining things as they are takes time. I'm guessing you mean Rook's Keep by Rune Storm ;)? I'm kinda curious what's inspiring about just seeing someone make a game? I get that it's cool, but I felt way more amped about going into game dev when I heard that people like QCF won award, or became financially viable. 1: As was pointed out earlier by other users we do have tutorials. We lack the stamp of the Almighty Moderator Team but any post, and OP of a topic, can be hearted so you can see how useful people found that topic. A collection of useful posts is cool, and we did have one once upon a time, but much like the wiki I mentioned previously it wasn't maintained and wasn't useful anymore.
People don't have to volunteer to write tutorials. You just go and post a new topic and share what you think would be cool. We don't have an Almighty Moderator Team that you must sacrifice the Unreal source code to in order to attain permission to share knowledge with the community. This is where the flat structure is cool, because any new person can just come and share something interesting and it'll end up on the main page and people will see it.
2, 3: Already covered both these points.
There isn't really anything stopping you from making a post rounding up screenshots of games every week or writing a tutorial to help people.
All suggestions are welcome, sure, and I'm suggesting ways of implementing what's desired. If you'd like to do these things, you're more than welcome to! I'd cheer you on too :)