New Forum Categories
Distributing Games
Essentially, those who use this forum would discuss the various methods of how you can distribute your game as freeware or perhaps shareware.
Furthermore, the community can discuss about business related topics such as sales, marketing, publishing, serving customers, and more. Hopefully, it would be similar to GameDev's Business and Law forum.
What also could be included in this forum are a few stickys. GMC has such a forum where their stickys consist of Copyright and Trademark Information/Questions along with Recommendations, which includes a list of Compression Programs, Install/Setup Programs, Help File Programs (Programs that create help files for your games), and website hosting.
Now what would be the most helpful topics are the ones about portals (places where you can submit your game). Hopefully, users of this community will find sites that are willing to accept quality BYOND games. This would help the promotion of your game and perhaps BYOND. This is an example of a possible post in Distributing Games.
Experienced Users Only
This forum is for users who have a lot of experience with DM, but need suggestions or tips (This forum will basically be a mixture of Dev How-To and Code Problems).
Sometimes I feel that "real" problems are ignored or "lost", such as the problems from people who have a great deal of experience with DM. While the every day problem “How do I make a ki blast” gets a quick response which could include a flame, redirection to a previous post with a similar problem, or an answer. Perhaps there should be a forum where only certain people (advanced users) can create post and reply to them, while the rest of the community can view them. This would help separate the experience users post from posts which are similar to yesterdays.
Extending BYOND
Discuss about extending the possibilities of BYOND while using DLL.
This would most likely be a sub forum for the creation or Design Philosophy forum. Users can discuss the problems and the possibilities of using DLL with BYOND.
Current Forum Categories
Creations
"Post code snippets or direct others to your new creations."
Although you would think this would be quite a clear message, people still ignore this description. I believe there should be a few rules for this forum.
When posting about a game creation...
1)Do not create a post if you do not have a demo
If you need a place to host your game, check the "Distributing Games Forum".
2)No illegal bumping
Instead of the "wait 24 hours rule"; change it where you cannot bump your thread unless you have an update (You still have to wait 24 hours).
3)Include a detailed description of your game
Don't just give us a link and expect us to play your game.
Developer How-To
"Not sure how to do something with BYOND? Ask here!"
Now there isn't much you can do for a template or rules, besides doing something like this:
<b>Description</b>
Give a detailed description of what you are trying to accomplish.
I believe with the addition of some of these ideas, the distributing game forum, it would help us expand the notice of our games along with building a stronger community. Sure most of my forum category ideas could easily be placed into the community forum, but it would be nice to separate them so we can get certain and important information much easier.
Calus CoRPS wrote:
This doesn't seem to fit BYOND so much, where distributing your game mostly amounts to creating a hub entry and uploading/linking the game files there. Not a lot of 'business' goes on, either.
It doesn't make too much sense to create a duplicate of existing forums. It would also be quite problematic to manage deciding who is an 'experienced user' and who isn't, and people may start requesting to be one, it could create a status gap. A good unseen side effect of this however would be the ability to make quality demos and libraries distinct, by checking if their author has the 'experienced user' status.
This should be applied to basically all forums, not just Creations, but it needs some changes. If you do have an update or something new to post, you're screwed for 24 hours, and editing your previous post has the disadvantage of not marking that the thread has been updated. Also, a block like that could be easily bypassed anyway if desired, by replying to a post made by another person in the thread (if any), using a different key, or deleting and reposting your latest post, et cetera. I think it would probably be better to have a warning appear above the message area when posting a post that appears to be a bump. It wouldn't stop it completely, but at least it's better than nothing, and people can still post updates to their thread.