Post by Eniko in Brainstorm how to get more people involved in the community

Viewing post in Brainstorm how to get more people involved in the community

The only thing I can say is that I'm a lot more likely to be active in a place where I can talk about my own stuff without fear of alienating people. I don't really know how to create an atmosphere that makes people feel safe to talk about the stuff they're putting so much of themselves into, but I do think being able to mention your work guilt-free is important as I think it'll encourage people to participate in more parts of the forum rather than just having a devlog thread for their games they update without going anywhere else.

Holy run-on sentence, Batman!

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Darkest Kale9 years ago(+2)

This is an important point, and to expand on it: Reddit make you feel like shit for mentioning what you're working on.

While I feel the forum should have a player focus as opposed to a dev-only focus, it should be very clear from the outset that talking about your work is encouraged rather than frowned upon.

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Eniko9 years ago(+2)

One way to facilitate both players and devs feeling comfortable and connecting is maybe to allow games to have a subforum? If my games had a forum where I could connect with the players of my games, I would certainly be using those and I'd probably stray outside them as well. It also gives both players and devs a reason to be here; meaningful interaction between developer and audience for specific games. Hopefully some of that would spill over into other parts of the forum? It'd also keep most of the shameless plugging isolated.

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Darkest Kale9 years ago

Individual games can have a subforum of sorts, in that you can enable comments on them (I haven't done this though, as I don't want an additional place to maintain)

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Lantana Games9 years ago(+1)

It'd be cool to split those forums up like Steam does, at least with General Discussion, Bug Reports, and Announcements areas. This way they'd feel less like a generic comments section on a news post and more like a dedicated hub of discussion on your project.

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Eniko9 years ago (1 edit)

Yeah personally I was thinking of a Steam like system for forums for games. The comments thread for a game isn't really a good place for engagement (particularly since nobody even seems to use it?).

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Lantana Games9 years ago

It'd be nice. The reason I keep being hesitant to activate comments on my games (though I begrudgingly do) is because I know they're just going to turn into flame-wars and I'll have to shut them off again. A little organization should help alleviate that a bit.

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leafoAdmin9 years ago(+2)

Definitely going to be adding this. I've already been in talks with a few developers who are going to use it for pre-launch. If you're interested I can add you to the list.

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Eniko9 years ago(+2)

Yes please, we're currently looking at community solutions for UHD so that would work out great.

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Lantana Games9 years ago(+1)

I so agree with this. The rules on reddit make it an impossible place to "self-promote" (cough market cough). I like blabbing about what my team and I are working on. Sharing cool things from development should absolutely be encouraged, or we're stuck with 140 characters to do so on Twitter, or posting to a closed-off vacuum on Facebook. Not fun.

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Lantana Games9 years ago

At least you had a comma! But I totally agree. We should never feel guilty about bragging about stuff we're doing that we think is cool. That's called marketing, and it's the cheapest form of marketing there is.

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echa9 years ago

This is a very good point. I understand that forums and game database are different things, but as for me, itch.io is an easiest place to upload a game at that moment. I would never doubt if I want to upload game here.

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