These are suggestions in part as someone looking at BYOND as a community, and in part as someone looking at BYOND as a software platform. As always, the luxury of being on the sidelines is that you don't have to consider the technical implications of implementing features.
Community-related stuff
- Merge guilds. All of them. Segregating a diminishing community just kills you faster.
- Create a FaceBook app that helps people spread the word about their game.
- Get rid of inactive guild leaders, replace them with someone who has the time and inclination to do the work. If one of those goes inactive, find someone new. Stop getting caught in not replacing inactive spots. Someone who is routinely too busy to update something more than once a month, semester or even worse 6 or 12 months is not in a position to lead a guild. If guilds get merged, this is less of an issue
- Offer game suggestions based on a balanced amount of each subgenre, internally classified in ways similar to how they are now. This gives genres with a lower number of games more face-time, which helps them. It raises competition in the active areas, which helps spur more development.
- Revamp the website. There have been countless suggestions on this, many of which have been viable. The click count is way too high, the color scheme is off, the website needs more fluidity and glitz, etc
- Audio/Graphics marketplace where people can share free resources or sell them for cool cash. Take a share of the money there. The idea here isn't to make loads off expensive artists, but to flood the marketplace with free icons and sounds that developers can use as they please.
- Stop the stay-at-BYOND incentives. Creating features that cause inbred advertisement hurt you! You want players and developers to go *outside* of BYOND and advertise, not advertise within BYOND. Blogs and way too much hub space are examples of this. You want game developers to put up their own websites, so they will go out and advertise them elsewhere as well.
- Consider looking at something like the Steam launcher, that places prominent ads for top-ranking games in the game launcher.
- Video advertisement. Get it. Do it.
- Contests. Start em. Most creative advertisement banner for a game; best medals for a game; most exotic artwork featured in a game; most creative gameplay feature; most well-reviewed hidden gem(unknown game); etc. etc. - Small prizes. Must be started by BYOND officially or they will not be run with any success. Someone with a key that doesn't represent BYOND (any key other than something starting with 'BYOND', 'Tom' or the 'Lummox Jr' key) will not be able to run these with success.
- Stop micromanaging your community too much. The amount of lenience shown to trolls makes moderation useless. Removing ads with scantily-clad girls removes revenue - They generate clicks, they're not worth removing. Ads directly advertising sex or viagra or similar obviously don't fall within that ballpark.
- This way of scooping certain individuals out of the public and into closed testing is counterproductive. Its also removed you from posting very much in public forums, compared to what you used to. It simply doesn't work anymore, it barely did back when I started being around there. Plug it, move on, and breathe life back into the public forums.
- The 'dont announce it until its done' mantra is bad. Do announce it. Announce it a lot. Ask for lots of feedback. There is a *reason* most websites post up-and-coming changes to the public. Don't post features you haven't decided on implementing, of course - But the public is far more forgiving of delays than silence. And the public WANTS to talk about up and coming features, instead of being whacked in the back of the head with them after they're done.
Technical Features, for Polish or Performance / Other
- Key creation API
- Custom, small splash screens
- Fixed version of link()
- Pre-define small loading screen that the splash loader can fetch from hub entry. Overlay a BYOND logo in the bottom right or something.
- DLL execution without requiring user authentication
- Built-in regex
- Built-in text on screen
- Ability to overlay primitives in map area
- Multiple maps
- True, actual full-screen mode
- Procedures to query for and more importantly *set* screen resolution as needed
- Client-side, compile-time scripts that can interface with the GUI, which trigger on events sent by the server. This allows things like accurate, real-time clocks and other to run fluidly without huge network traffic to update them.
I'm sure there are plenty more technical things, but its late and I don't remember them all. The most important ones deal with resolution/full screen, the key API, primitives and text on screen as well as the client-side stuff.
They seem to spend a-lot of time on the language, thats beautiful and as a programmer I love that, but in all honesty i'd like there to be a larger community for my games as well.
+Yea.
Ideas:
-> Pager graphic redesign.
-> Website redegisn.