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NightBlade6 years ago (1 edit)

I thought a lot about this the last few days, and you bring up some good points. Here's what I'm thinking:

  • Ratings are very niche on Itch right now. You can only see them one view (Top Rated), and they're going to be revamped soon anyway.
  • It's imperative to rate honestly (to not create a voting ring/gang). Therefore, it's better to rate something good (if you like it), or not to rate it at all if you don't (unless we have 3-4+ people rating each game).
  • Feedback is more valuable to developers anyway; especially if they want feedback on specific things (eg. a specific mechanic, a specific level or weapon).
  • As you brought up, it's better to let people submit their/others' games than to randomly pick something.

What I had in mind is that a few people submit games, and a few people pick/critique whatever games from that list they find interesting. I think this would avoid most of the problems above, but still be useful for game developers.

What do you think?

There's also a list of developers on Twitter asking for feedback on their Itch games. We can engage them, and/or use that as the list of games to rate to start. Maybe.

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Megaflops6 years ago (1 edit) (+1)
  • I agree that insightful and actionable feedback is more important than ratings. A five-star voting system with no subcategories provides very little information.
  • I'm concerned about this becoming yet another vehicle for self-promotion. That's why I'm not keen on letting people nominate their own games. That at least one person who isn't the developer cares about the game is a reasonable bar to set, IMO. If someone sees someone else asking for feedback and thinks their game is worth nominating, then that's fine, of course.
  • If each participant picks a game on their own, won't this become a lot like the "Recommend a game" board? For me, this is as much about getting some discussions going as providing feedback to developers. With all the talent that's gathered here, I find it a little sad that 90% of the activity on the boards is advertising and requests for support. Have the conversations moved to Discord and Twitter and all that newfangled stuff? I'm a forum guy, myself.
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NightBlade6 years ago

Okay, let's try it. I guess the implicit assumption is that the game developers will read our comments/feedback/etc. We may not get feedback on our feedback, but that's cool.

I actually don't mind if you pick first. I haven't really looked at many games on Itch yet, other than my own.

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Megaflops6 years ago

I've looked at a few, at least. Away Team by Underflow Studios is an interactive fiction adventure in space with some graphical elements. I started playing it a while ago, but stopped due to lack of time and a few annoyances, like text that occasionally wouldn't scroll. The story and concept of the game still intrigues me, so if you're up for it then we can start there. The minimum price is $2, is that OK?

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NightBlade6 years ago (1 edit)

Since we're just starting out, sure, that's okay. But if I can put some restrictions, I would suggest:

  • Free games only. (Otherwise, if this picks up momentum, it'll be another easy self-promotion / free-sales thing to spam.)
  • We should avoid genres either or both of us really don't like.

For me, IF and visual novels are not my thing. At all. But since we're starting, that's cool.

I'll make an "official" week 1 thread for this shortly and we can use this thread to coordinate stuff.

Sounds good?

Oh, and although it's not required, I plan to leave a comment and/or rating on the game itself for developers, for any games that I end up playing because of this. Thanks for being the second person! This is now officially a "thing" :)

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Megaflops6 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Free games only is alright. It's probably easier to get the ball rolling that way. I would actually have chosen a free game myself, if I had a good candidate available. It turned out that most of the titles in my collection were very short, already popular and/or not free.

I sympathize with your wish to not have to play games you just can't get into. If this takes off and a decent-sized pool of participants develops, then people skipping games that don't appeal to them shouldn't be a huge problem. If it ends up being just the two of us talking to each other, then frankly I'm not going to continue doing this, anyway. Taking part in community discussions is fine, but I'm not interested in being one half of a reviewer duo.

Commenting on the game pages or otherwise notifying the developers is a good idea, once we have something to show them.

So, should we stick with Away Team like you said or do you want me to go find a free, non-IF game? I could probably do that, if you give me a day. Nominating something yourself is also fine.

EDIT: I just ran into some missing DLL trouble trying to run Away Team on a Windows machine, so that's another reason why it might not be the best choice.

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NightBlade6 years ago

Agree to all of the above. Hopefully this takes off and we have a bigger pool in a couple of weeks.

I'm fine with Away Team. How about: if you can't get it running in 24 hours, pick something else? Either is fine, let me know and I'll put it in the "official" thread.

BTW, Itch has a concept of Collections (I just learned about this recently). It's a good way to track games you want to check out later. I forgot that I have three games saved up in there.

Just to clarify, we're not doing this as a reviewer duo. We're just agreeing to play the same game at the same time and give the developer some sort of useful (detailed? actionable?) feedback on it.

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Cheeseness6 years ago(+1)

Hi hi! One of The Away Team's devs here. Have you been in touch with us about the missing DLL issue you encountered? I don't do Windows myself, but I know that lead dev Michael will be super keen to hear about this and look into the issue ahead of the big update we have planned for (fingers crossed) later this month.

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Underflow Studios6 years ago

Hey All,

Following up with what cheeseness said. I would love to know which DLL was missing. I will immediately fix this issue. I am so sorry there was a DLL missing. I'm going to guess it's probably the C++ redist DLL. On steam it installs some redists for us. On itch we don't have that option. I should package all third party dlls with the itch version and I thought I did... But maybe the C++ redist dll is missing. It may also be openal although I thought I got that DLL.

Lastly my email is always open for support issues at support@awayteam.space (this goes to my personal email so don't think you are sending an email into a support void. I usually respond within 16 hours business hours (48 hours real time).

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Megaflops6 years ago(+2)

Probably OpenAL, yes. The error message I get (in a red-X dialog, immediately when I run "The Away Team.exe") reads

The code execution cannot proceed because OpenAL32.dll was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem.

The only DLLs in the install directory are

sfml-audio-2.dll
sfml-graphics-2.dll
sfml-system-2.dll
sfml-window-2.dll
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Underflow Studios6 years ago (1 edit)

https://www.openal.org/downloads/ should work to install openal. Steam automatically install openAL to those launching the game but I will make sure that openal redist + dll is in the next itch drm-free build. 

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