EmpirezTeam wrote:

Blogs were kinda lame. The majority of blog entries were "look at my bald guy in a diaper" or "i just made a new title screen". Very few people were using them to blog things of any importance so it's not like we lost something we needed.

All of those people moved to the base & title screen forum. Now instead of having their posts able to be hidden from the front of the members page, they're guaranteed a front spot on the forum page.

The reason blogs were used poorly is because BYOND actually has a small number of game developers and because there was no direction about how the blogs should be used. If these three things were made clear:

1. BYOND is a game development community.
2. BYOND blogs are for chronicling your experiences in developing BYOND games (if you want to tell people about what happened in school, get a tumblr or something else).
3. BYOND game development is not about ripping or drawing "bases".

The blogs would have been a valuable resource. You could read a blog to follow the progress of a game's development. If you find a library to be especially useful in your game, you could blog about it to let other people know about the resource and how to use it. If you run into a problem while developing your game, you can blog about it and get meaningful help - you don't have to summarize your problem in half a page on the forum, you have an entire blog of background information about the project.

The blogs were a place that actual discussion could take place and provided a way for people to get to know each other as game developers. With only having a forum it's difficult for people to become interested in each other's projects. BYOND's strength should be that it offers a community of game developers to help you refine your game ideas. While BYOND doesn't have many people who know anything about game development and could provide useful input, it doesn't have the mechanism for this type of interaction either.

Tom wrote:

The bottom line is that the way we had things setup, we had discussion in two places, under two different UIs. The blogs were essentially just another forum with custom colors, where the only posts people cared about were the ones crossposted to the front page (which is what a forum is).

Right now, if you want to talk about a game, you can just do it with the game's hub entry and it will be crossposted to a number of public places. If you want to talk about general game development, you can do so one of the forums. Maybe it doesn't attach the name to the post as much as the blogs did, but it serves basically the same purpose and, from a technical POV, it's just a lot cleaner now.

People don't feel open to discuss things on the forums like they did on blogs. There's a lot of communication that won't happen now even though the site still technically supports it.

Anyway, as far as the topic goes, I think it would be a good thing to promote these monthly picks better (even if only to expose a decent game to new users every so often), so we can do that through the front page box and the pager.

It'd also be good to not limit it to being monthly picks. It's currently optimistic to think there'll be one good BYOND game made per month and in the future there will hopefully be more than one a month. The featured status shouldn't be something that disappears when the month is over - the set of "featured games" should always be available to show people what they should aim for when making a BYOND game. It'd be a way to show people that stat/verb panels just don't cut it anymore by only selecting games with nice interfaces to be featured.

BYOND has a lot of users who have no clue how to actually develop a game and the site does hardly anything to set them straight. Unless you're hoping for a new breed of users to come along so the current users can be swept to the side, the site should offer more to show users how they should be creating games. Having a list of featured games could be used to help out in that regard, but it'll take more than just a box on a page.

The featured games list could just be a compilation of all the past game of the month titles.

Alchemist was "game of the month" last month, but the post got buried almost instantly and I don't think anyone really saw it.

Oasiscircle wrote:

Alchemist was "game of the month" last month, but the post got buried almost instantly and I don't think anyone really saw it.

A shame really all games of the month should be sticky for at least a month then taken down.

This should become a common thing it's not like it is hard for a "mod" to press the button especially the one creating the posts.. if that person is a mod of course.

How about an extra sticky post which links to all former features? While the keyword should theoretically suffice, it's not obvious and it isn't listed in the forum index. For the price of just one more sticky, the games will get persistent advertising while the current feature gets the spotlight.

Well, when saying it is mixed with Zelda, along with RP elements. Zelda IS a RPG, are you saying that this game has OTHER role-playing elements?

Epic is epic, that's all you need to know.