Devlogs

In which ways is this different from the news?
I mean which features does it have the current game news does not have?

iiiiiiiiii think devlogs should have the header/top portion of Fireside and the body/timeline of our forum threads where people should be able to comment/like each of the posts. I don't think people should be able to "rate" devlogs, just follow and add to playlist. The page should still have stats of visits, etc like regular game pages. NOW DISCUSS (and maybe disagree?)

Think of this as more of an expansion of game news, rather than a completely new feature. We're wanting to make pages more interesting to look at, so with the addition of image and video posts it'll definitely improve the look. And right now the game new's section is a little underwhelming and buried away.

This will also pave the way for more social interaction on the site in the future.

Statistics for devlogs is a good idea, but does it need to be shown publicly? The number of followers surely is enough for popularity ranking.

I do agree with simplifying the header a lot more since less information will be needed when showing off a game in development.

This is also going to be where work-in-progress games go. Rather than having full game pages, they will be considered devlogs, and the design will be much more focused around development. And rather than just news posts, I'd like to get pictures, videos, etc. in place.

This is also going to be where work-in-progress games go. Rather than having full game pages, they will be considered devlogs, and the design will be much more focused around development.

Small question, does this mean work-in-progress games won't appear in "Newly Added" until they are released? And when you say "work-in-progress games", do you mean games that are unfinished or games that have no downloadable build?

Correct. They will instead be in "newly added devlogs". Rather than looking at rating data to "find the best" we'll go based on followers. This is because looking at ratings for in-development games is a bit meh.

I envision that games that are actively being worked on would go here. I think we should allow Devlogs to have prototype builds, but as soon as it's playable/solid enough, they should switch it to a game page.

I think we should allow Devlogs to have prototype builds, but as soon as it's playable/solid enough, they should switch it to a game page.

You mean allowing in the rules to link to prototype builds hosted elsewhere (like on my project's github page), or to have an actual upload system in the devlog system?

They will instead be in "newly added devlogs". Rather than looking at rating data to "find the best" we'll go based on followers. This is because looking at ratings for in-development games is a bit meh.

Well, my opinions on ratings put aside, I guess the number of followers can also be pretty subjective, still it work work much better than ratings for WIP-games. Although I guess some lifesigns from the dev (if possible) could also be looked at. There can be projects with over 20k followers while the dev didn't touch the project (not even bothering telling his followers he abandoned it). Still these games would still be on the top-list (since followers do not always bother to unfollow such games).
Is there a way to "punish" this kind of inactivity?

Progress on the initial look of text posts.

Looks cool.
A bit FireSide like.

One question or remark though. I see "by @nik ". I guess the username and not the screenname is used. (Hard to tell in your case as I guess both your user and screen names are "Nik").
At an old blog article of mine (now moved to FireSide) somebody was confused seeing my avatar but the article being written by "@tricky ", and was even thinking at first "tricky" was a complete different user impersonating as me. (Which is not the case since "tricky" is in fact my username). He was at the time pretty relieved when he clicked "@tricky " seeing the "Phantasar Productions" profile (which was back then my screen name).
Perhaps it could be a good idea (for this feature, but for FireSide as well), to prevent this confusion (or we might suffer a lot of people falsely being reported for impersonating somebody else).

We want to try and use usernames more on the site as a form of unique identification rather than display names, but I understand why putting them on posts is a bad idea.

To be honest, should the author even be on there? Right now the site only allows one developer, so it seems kind of pointless.

At the current time yes, but we all know the call for supporting multiple devs. Especially now that GJ is going to support paid games, on which multiple devs is more like a rule than an exception,this can be helpful (even if the team only has one person posting devlogs).

Just added support for image and video posts. This means that if there's a new bit of gameplay or simply a new screen that you'd like to show your followers, you can use these kinds of posts instead. They can still be liked and commented on, but are just meant for simpler content.

Should these have a limit on the caption fields? I don't think that people writing essays in captions would be good because it then should belong as a text post. But if we give a limit, then people may not be able to say as much as they want.

Should these have a limit on the caption fields?

Maybe there should be a recommended character limit, and if people write a text longer than recommended, they'll get a warning (but they can still continue writing if they feel like it). Or too long a post could be automatically sent as a text post (if text posts support images, though).

I'm not very fond of limits unless there where they are really needed.
They say a picture tells a 1000 words, but some pictures may really require a long explanation in words. Of course some people don't use internet forms well (when I was the main administrator of a website where companies could write wanted-ads, it was really to burst in tears how some people did not know how to handle the forms they had to fill in to get an advertisement placed. From companies you should expect better).

Or too long a post could be automatically sent as a text post (if text posts support images, though).

I guess the "text posts" will support Markdown, right?

If that's the case maybe I should just put a fade dropdown like I've done with the text posts.

Yeah, I was planning on having the text posts and captions supporting markdown.

So I've been playing around with combining the new game page style and devlogs to game overviews. Since a game in development won't primarily be about the final release, the devlog feed is prioritised in the content area whilst the description and builds are placed to the right.

Because of the potentially long feed and the fact that users can comment on each post, comments have been moved to another section. This might stay like this for published games, but we could have a widget that pulls out the best comments in the sidebar.

Thoughts?

I don't see a reason to limit the text on a media post just because it's not a pure text post. Slap a faded drop down text field on it just like the text posts and let the devs write all they want. I think this would be a great idea.

On that note I would like to suggest something to be added, if it's not been done yet. Consider adding a "Collapse" button at the bottom of an extended drop down text field so the reader doesn't have to scroll back up in order to collapse that post. This might come in handy on those really detailed posts.

Also, I like the Description being placed on the right hand side. Not sure about comments though, how would it be decided which ones get pulled over?

And I'll end this with a question: Will the dev logs be organized with the newest at the top or will the reader be able to sort it how they like? (Acending vs Decending)

Thanks for the response!

Consider adding a "Collapse" button at the bottom of an extended drop down text field so the reader doesn't have to scroll back up in order to collapse that post.

They already do that, don't worry! You can see this in action on really long game descriptions and chat messages.

Not sure about comments though, how would it be decided which ones get pulled over?

One idea we had was we would pull the most liked comments. This way it could be a mix of good, funny or honest opinions about the game. Since the developer can't like comments on the game, it would be community driven. Plus, it makes liking comments more purposeful! If there aren't enough liked comments, maybe we'd just pull out random ones. With the new reporting system in place I'm sure awful comments won't appear as often as they used to.

Will the dev logs be organized with the newest at the top or will the reader be able to sort it how they like?

I like this a lot. I was thinking of showing them in reverse chronological order, so you'd see the newer posts at the top when you visit, but for first timers it would be a helpful feature. We could even sort by most likes!

So the way I do my indev games won't be possible? :-( I make them a game page, upload builds, so people can download them & give feedback even very early on, before there is anything playable. And you want to take that away? ;-(

I put builds on the right hand side with the description, don't worry!

Still I'm not very happy with all the changes. I didn't see anyone ask for a different type of game pages depending on game state or a different rating system for that matter. Why do you (GJ team as a whole) keep breaking/redesigning what already works instead of implementing new stuff that is actually wanted? Like multi-developer games and ad revenue sharing?

I liked the old GJ site, it was clean, normal font sized that worked nicely on my monitor, it only needed a few additions here and there and some fixing of stuff thatwas broken. What we have now is a new behemoth that taxes my mouse scroll wheel or I need to use browser scaling to fit the page on screen (like it or not, hidpi screens are still relatively new & mostly unseen outside of apple hardware), where I feel lost now and again, because things constantly change. Sadly, not neccessarily for good :-(.

There, I said it.

The features we are working on are needed on the site. Some people won't think they have the same priority than others, but you can't please everyone.

• We updated the entire look and flow of the site with Game Jolt Next. This was because the site was getting very old and very hard to maintain. We wanted to improve a lot of things, but in its previous state we couldn't.

• We added the ability to use the site and functionality as a standalone app due to how efficient it would be for people to download games.

• We updated the forums to keep it consistent with the rest of the site, as well as improving the way discussion works.

• We are going to release marketplace to finally let people sell games.

Not sure which of these features were useless, but in my opinion the order these were released was fine. Things will break because we're a small team and nothing is perfect.

Now the list of features to come have been chosen for a reason. They are ordered by significance. Devlogs, for instance, is to combat the big problem of unreleased games dominating the site. A lot of people just want to play games, but the majority of the games they find are unplayable. With devlogs we can finally separate released and unreleased games, as well as improve the way you as a developer can share content with other users.

The reason why we haven't done group features yet is because of the biggest factor - we need marketplace to be done. This is an entirely new feature that needs to be thought about a lot and isn't an improvement like the other features.

As with the new rating system discussion, that's all it is - a discussion. I just wanted to know people's thoughts. Heck, I don't even know when or if that'll happen.

Sorry for my little rant over there. I'm overworked and on top of that I feel some of the changes on the site are not good (but I love some of the others like freeing the code and the client), patricularly I don't like the ones which change the GJ that I fell in love with those years ago into something different, focused on money, not hobby.

Yo Cyber, you voice concerns I had with the marketplace too at the beginning so I know exactly where you're coming from - its definitely a scary change, and some people may see it as "selling out" (literally, pun not intended tho), but the way I came to see it after talking to some real indies is that they now have a viable platform to fully immerse themselves in the hobby and even make a living out of it.

Game Jolt has the largest community ever for indie games and gamers, and all we're gearing for is in the end the community itself and nothing feels better than being able to help indies go pro.

We made many changes and considered a buttload of things to help keep it community oriented and not intimidating for us hobbyists, dont you worry :)

So, what convinced you that the new stuff is good? Personally I'm scared of GJ becoming something like android marketplace, filled to the brink with scams and spam. Or like another steam, where there is no community between creators and players, only a client-customer model.

Maybe let's get back to the topic - I still don't see a reason to change the game pages. If people are getting frustrated because they bump into indev games (like my game which I started 2 years ago and still don't have anything playable, I might have posted it a bit too early :-P ), then they should learn to use filters and look only at complete games. This is perfectly usable at this moment, I don't see how making indev games pages different could change that.

We dont want to force a square peg in a round hole. Games in development have different needs than finished games. We're not separating them out, we're custom fitting them. Devlogs will allows us to focus on whats important for WIP games without having to try and patch it onto a template that doesnt do it justice! Take for example the news role in finished games vs the devlog entries in WIP games. We need to emphasize that role and compliment it with more awesome features that will make the entire process awesome.

As for educating the users on how to use the website - I have to disagree. When users browse the hot games category for example, most are just looking for new good games to play. Then when they stumple upon something that looks awesome and find out theres no playable build it's just disappointing. Yeah, I understand many of the epic games on Game Jolt are still in development, but when discovered in the wrong context it sucks. Instead, giving these games their own section will allow us to build awesome tools and views around them, and intuitively doing an infinitely better job explaining and educating the userbase about what are games in development and draw more interested peeps in.

I know I'm late to the discussion, but this:

Or like another steam, where there is no community between creators and players, only a client-customer model.

Is exactly why I'm pushing for devlogs. I want more community and interaction between gamers and devs. Gamers are following tons and tons of games on the site because they want to be involved, and constantly updated on cool stuff. But they don't get it, really. The site isn't pushing it well enough. Our game pages for in development stuff don't encourage that level of interaction in the development yet. That's what this will be about.

The changes won't be that dramatic. It's really just improving the "news" system to make it so you can post all kinds of content, and to increase the ways that gamers can interact with each post. For example, liking as well as commenting. And then the last piece will be making sure that gamers can actually have a place to go to view all the stuff they're following.

I pushed out an update to game pages today to get ready for devlogs. See if you like it.

So... any news on this? When is this coming? Soon, sooner, later? (Okay, it has been only 20 days since the previous post, but I'm just impatient.