First off, thanks to all of you for your thoughts and sympathy. It's still hard to fathom, but I'm getting better.
On to less important things... Schnitzelnagler posted a bug report in the forum a couple of days ago, which had rendered ManoAMano unplayable. What bothers me is that the game seems to have been this way for about six weeks, and nobody had posted an ingame bug report or a notification on the forum. Ouch...
It looks to be fixed now, along with a fix for a minor button overlay issue that has been hanging round for a while.
ID:47373
 Aug 30 2008, 2:55 pm
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Aug 30 2008, 3:13 pm
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Squeegy
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Yeah, the bastards do that a lot.
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I remember a version of Webcrawl sent players to a null location for months and nobody mentioned it. It's hard to get feedback and that which you do get is often too vague to be of use.
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You know it's kind of funny, BYOND is home to a decent number of young developers. In spite of this though, the community seems to lack the development spirit. You know, that notion of when something is wrong, you help the creator fix it by reporting it, giving plenty of information, going out of your way a bit to do some further tests without being asked.
OpenSS13 saw this a fair bit, while I was working on it. We had a bug tracker that (at the time) we turned round at least responses on pretty quickly. And why not, after all we valued people's input. On the whole, the bug tracker actually reported about 10% of bugs people had actually found well, and another 10% not so. 80% of the bugs didn't make it to the tracker. Usually about 40% came through to developers on IM programs as "Waa X has broken! Fix it!" (quite often with that explicit demand too), and a further 20% cropped up in passing conversation I happened to hear. It's crazy, in an Open Source project where people should be pro-active, 20% of people actually were. There rest were either whiney, or didn't bother at all. Now you could say fair enough, if this had been some retail game, they'd be consumers then. But it's BYOND, that place where people go to develop little 2D games. I've seen in crop up in several forms in BYOND and I must say it really does confuse me. | |
Hi Flick,
Belated well-wishes from me. I'm glad time is healing your pain, if only a little. I share in your frustration regarding the "unplayable" game-- I've seen this a number of times and it always bums me out. Truly the best games on BYOND are often left neglected. I have bashed my head against the wall on numerous occassions to try to figure out how we can energize the audiences for such games, but so far have not come upon the holy grail. I only hope that you developers don't lose faith, because popularity (particularly among the one-sided crowd we have here) is NOT the indicator of success. Speaking of which, I just today posted a bug regarding ACWraith's "Occupied Forces", which I am eager to try out. It's on your forum, AC, so no excuses. | |
I know how you precisely feel, as I have seen countless bugs arise within my game. But instead of taking the time out to write an acceptable bug report the user determined logging out is the best alternative. It is really hard to get decent feedback with this community right now and it just kills my motivation to continue working.
I also have another problem which I assume most developers can relate to, getting users to play our game. I tried hosting when I had the time and I received a few users at a time, not enough to my satisfaction. But when I stop hosting to allow the community to do this, no one takes a step forward and commits to it. Once in a while I see someone hosting the game for about five minutes and then leaves. This makes it nearly impossible for me to ever find out what the bugs are. This also kills my motivation and somewhat convinces me that my game is not good. | |
I think most of the problem is that people seem to think that others should do the work for them. I'm a sucker for this as well because when I find a bug with something, I usually turn to Chatters to see if I'm the only one with the problem. In turn I end up seeing if someone else will do the bug report. I know a lot of people like seeing their names in the notes when bugs are fixed, me I just enjoy seeing them get fixed.
If you ever need to talk Flick, I'm here... I'm great for venting, and talking is good. It's good to get things out, and not bottle them inside. | |
Instead of complaining about users not reporting bugs, why not make it easier for them? Sometimes they just don't think about it, or think you don't care about it.
Some things you could do. If a user leaves in the first 30 minutes of playing, send em a page asking them to do a quick survey of what they thought of your game. Or maybe once a week or month, send an announcement to all players asking them to fill out a quick survey, maybe throw in a reward. Just asking people what they think, what they hate. It might reveal bugs that you can fix! | |
This is just it, you can practically lay it out on a silver platter to users and it doesn't make a difference.
I suspect harrassing a user when they leave wouldn't be too smart. Announcing a survey isn't too bad, apart from the fact you'll get the same people responding that already submit reports. OpenSS13 had this when we polled for ideas on what direction people would like to see development go. You basically get minimal interest in that sort of thing, unless you start throwing cash incentives at it. If I may, why should a developer bend over backwards to get information out of a user to do something like fix a bug. Surely reporting only looks to benefit all, including the user? If this were a scenario where users were paying for the game, you'd say fair enough. But they aren't, the developer is doing it to share his/her creation with people, as a hobby. Considering the amount of giving the developer does, including the fixes themselves, the least a user could do is use the provided facilities to report bugs they find (not least because then it'll get fixed, and sotp annoying them). | |
Mano A Mano has a bug report button right in the game with a big picture of a bug on it. It doesn't get much easier and its mere existence should show that Flick cares. (Likewise, forums should show that game developers in general care, but players leave them empty.)
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Yes, I see your points. I wasn't making a comment about how anything was currently done. Just coming up with ideas about how to possibly improve feedback.
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Wow your site's background is totaly fucked up! lol..i cant see anything!
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Oops... Not sure why I'm using photobucket for my image storage. Maybe blog storage wasn't available when I put this together. Fixed for now :P
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Woohoo! I can read when skimming for Tech Tree again! =)
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Good ol' Schnitzelnagler.
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