Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Draco18s]

Just don't forget about your kickstarters otherwise they get cranky haha. I have seen a few people fire and forget on KS and then complain about lack of updates, when any updates which were made were not posted on kickstarter

You mean like the update that said "I'm not going to do periodic updates on Kickstarter, go here instead"?

[nenjin]

Which, you know, makes little sense to me. Kickstarter is already an aggregate of the people who have given you money. It's already a mailing list of people you owe something to. Why not use it, at least up until release, even to announce small things, let alone the giant announcements? At times I'm a little perplexed by SB's desire for "community management tools" when he doesn't use the ones that are already readily available to him. I get he wants to drive traffic somewhere, what I don't get is where and why.

[Draco18s]

Which, you know, makes little sense to me. Kickstarter is already an aggregate of the people who have given you money. It's already a mailing list of people you owe something to. Why not use it, at least up until release, even to announce small things, let alone the giant announcements? At times I'm a little perplexed by SB's desire for "community management tools" when he doesn't use the ones that are already readily available to him. I get he wants to drive traffic somewhere, what I don't get is where and why.

For one, very simple reason:

For all those people who find his game after Kickstarter can join a thriving community without having to join Kickstarter and then find only [Backer Only] updates.

[nenjin]

I think it's a necessary part of the time commitment to manage both your backers and your future, potential fans. I get a one-size fits all approach is ideal.....but the tools are there, now, to keep backers directly informed. And right now they ARE the community. While I'm not going to get bent out of shape, because I'm capable of finding updates, it's not exactly formenting a strong community when your first decision is that they need to chase you across the internet. Simply continuing to use the backer updates avoid that problem, even if it introduces a new one of having to cross post information. Is copy/pasting the content of an update from your Kickstarter email to (an html webpage, a facebook comment, a forum post) truly that time consuming?

[Draco18s]

I think it's a necessary part of the time commitment to manage both your backers and your future, potential fans. I get a one-size fits all approach is ideal.....but the tools are there, now, to keep backers directly informed. And right now they ARE the community. While I'm not going to get bent out of shape, because I'm capable of finding updates, it's not exactly formenting a strong community when your first decision is that they need to chase you across the internet. Simply continuing to use the backer updates avoid that problem, even if it introduces a new one of having to cross post information.

Just FYI, he's not the only person to do this.

I don't know if you've been paying attention lately, but Doublefine has their own forums where they post 90% of their updates.  Kickstarter only gets about 10%

I found out that their game got a name, changed from a development name, and that backers got to vote for it.

I went, "Wait, what?" because last I'd known (cough, been paying attention) they were still in the brainstorming super secretive phase.

Now, had I been on the forums--which I KNEW existed and which I KNEW had more news--I'd have known this.  But I wasn't.  Because I didn't have the time to deal with a community of ninety thousand people.  By the time I even registered for the forum account the forums were chock full of speculation and "hi, I'm Jon" threads and I pretty much logged out after three minutes.

Of course, I hadn't really been watching the video updates they did posted on Kickstarter either....

Do I bitch at them?

No.

[Aklyon]

Hey everybody!
I need to fiddle with the settings on this forum... by the time I get an email notice that someone responded to this thread, I come back and there are tons of posts...

G+ Hangouts
Yeah the video quality isn't so hot, but 1. they're working on it, 2. that's not as important to me as engaging people and having some more of that community stuff going on.

I'm not going to complain if you really want to do it that way, but theres two things I want to bring up of relevance:
1, (may be wrong here, if you can actually see these sans account) I don't think many people who don't have a G+ account in the first place are going to want to have to get one just to see a stream when you don't need to do a thing to see a livestream or stream on justin/twitch.tv, and those let you set the quality to whatever you think you can handle.
2, from the pictures I've seen, this is probably going to have a lot of text in not a huge size. And reading smaller text on a stream usually requires 480p at minimum (for youtube in fullscreen), or closer to 720p if you aren't in fullscreen and want to still be legible.

[ScriptWolf]

Just don't forget about your kickstarters otherwise they get cranky haha. I have seen a few people fire and forget on KS and then complain about lack of updates, when any updates which were made were not posted on kickstarter

You mean like the update that said "I'm not going to do periodic updates on Kickstarter, go here instead"?

As said with the fire and forget I follow spark on Facebook and check daily for updates. But even I forgot he had posted that update on kickstarter and I was just saying

[nenjin]

Do I bitch at them?

Am I bitching at him? I don't think so, although I can understand the perception. I'm just voicing my concerns and preferences, which is exactly what he asked for on Facebook (and has gotten about 4 replies to, I might add.)

I don't know if you've been paying attention lately, but Doublefine has their own forums where they post 90% of their updates.  Kickstarter only gets about 10%

We are in agreement this is an inherently unequal comparison on most levels, right?

[Draco18s]

Do I bitch at them?

Am I bitching at him? I don't think so, although I can understand the perception. I'm just voicing my concerns and preferences, which is exactly what he asked for on Facebook (and has gotten about 4 replies to, I might add.)

General sentiment, not necessarily you in particular.

I don't know if you've been paying attention lately, but Doublefine has their own forums where they post 90% of their updates.  Kickstarter only gets about 10%

We are in agreement this is an inherently unequal comparison on most levels, right?

Probably.  But I don't see why a small developer can't have their own forums too.

[sparkbolt]

I think looking at this post by MoaCube will give you a good idea on what I'm thinking about now.
I love twitter because it keeps me from wasting time on big dev updates when I should be... well, developing. Facebook has been our best way to reach our old fans, new fans, and new potential fans, though as MoaCube says as well that's been changing.

Really, I hope we'll save the rest of this conversation until after the game is launched.  I plan on making a direct info page on the web site, which will show the Twitter dev updates on top, the post updates (launch, content updates, important things) under that, and links to the social communities and wiki. The individual communities will get crossposts to what matters to them. Basically i need to push content to where people are instead of making them go out of their way to check yet-another-site, because if it comes down to it they simply wont.

As for Kickstarter, you should know that the backend for posting updates is actually completely horrible. They have a terrible editor that often screws up your work as you're writing it, no draft option, no useful way to sort/find users, and a bunch of other crap that just gets the way.  Not to mention, it's only good for existing backers (many of which only use kickstarter to buy things, not as a community, as it's not very good at that), and new people are excluded, splitting the community again.  I do want to reach out to people where they are, but they're on social platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.

As for hangouts, they broadcast to youtube, you don't need an account to see them (or the G+ page for that matter). the text thing is an issue but i was mainly planning on using it to talk to the community in a more face to face manner.  i'll switch to some other streaming thing if they don't get their act together and deal with the image quality.

I asked for feedback, it's all good

We do have forums, but until the launch at the end of the month there's not much content to share. Basically this whole conversation should really be tabled until i'm on the content schedule we'll have, since there's not much to say now.

Speaking of, I need to get back to work!

[nenjin]

I plan on making a direct info page on the web site, which will show the Twitter dev updates on top, the post updates (launch, content updates, important things) under that, and links to the social communities and wiki. The individual communities will get crossposts to what matters to them. Basically i need to push content to where people are instead of making them go out of their way to check yet-another-site, because if it comes down to it they simply wont.

This is good enough for me, truly. A top-level site for information is all I really want. From there I can decide which community group/groups I want to contribute to. As long as I can go one place and see updates right at the top, I can deal with the rest.

Although if your game has a future for modding, where people decide to contribute becomes a lot more important. Like, consider what DF would be like without the modding forum where all that stuff gets aggregated.

As for Kickstarter, you should know that the backend for posting updates is actually completely horrible.

Yeah I had no idea. I assumed it was at least at the level of, I dunno, Wordpress.

[sparkbolt]

Nope, it's awful. Heheh, like... unnecessarily bad. copy/pasting into/from their window completely rips out the formatting, screws up the spacing, and causes glitches.

Yeah, i think the top-level will work best, while still letting me reach people in their social platform of choice, and increase the game's visibility.

Forums are definitely and always have been my expected repository for modding and content stuff.

[Draco18s]

Yeah I had no idea. I assumed it was at least at the level of, I dunno, Wordpress.

No, it's pretty bad

[sparkbolt]

I'm still worried people are not going to be pleased with how raw the prototype is. Not only is it missing many of the core features that really add life to the game (traits, headlines, operations, etc), but it's not very pretty with blocks of text. (As seen in the latest KS Update)

I just have to keep my focus on gameplay development as my temptation to switch to pretty this early will just undercut all the important stuff that still has to get done, and a good portion of it will probably have to get scrapped when the game design shifts in this early mutable stage.

[ScriptWolf]

I'm still worried people are not going to be pleased with how raw the prototype is. Not only is it missing many of the core features that really add life to the game (traits, headlines, operations, etc), but it's not very pretty with blocks of text. (As seen in the latest KS Update)

I just have to keep my focus on gameplay development as my temptation to switch to pretty this early will just undercut all the important stuff that still has to get done, and a good portion of it will probably have to get scrapped when the game design shifts in this early mutable stage.

Stick with what you have spark and keep going even if the game is not nice looking if some of the functionality is there saying "hey this is how I am now and I'm going to be so much better later" that's all what matters. Try and get what you think is most important to give the best impression of the prototype done before release even if it means pushing back the date.

I personally like the boxes so long as some even a little functionality is there which makes it a little fun and you can play with your operatives and see what it's like I will be happy