Game Jolt - Share your creations

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Hello, I would like to suggest some features to improve the game developer experience on the site. Although I find interesting the new user-focused direction Gamejolt is taking with the communities and I must congratulate David and Yaprak for the seed funding I can't stop finding myself worried for what "TikTok for games" means specially for the developers who feed the platform.

I think crucial features for developers are beign left behind for this new social media stuff and with this thread I would like to shed some light on them:

A proper panel for developers, where they can see all the games and their statistics such as views, downloads, payments, etc. Currently to see how games are doing you need to check each of them individually, why not having all the information in one place?
Give some use to the portfolio site. I know the portfolio site is more like a site builder for people who don't know web development, but I think it's kinda pointless and don't see many people using it. I would like to suggest a way to use the portfolio site as the default site for your profile instead of the social media stuff, as a developer I prefer showing my games than showing how many people I follow. Or maybe not replacing but at least give it a special button on the profile to send you to the portfolio. This gives way more visualization to all of your games rather than a small sidebar showing the latest ones. Other option maybe is a way to change the layout of your profile.
Where are the jams? I feel many current features are very obscure, a simplistic design doesn't mean deleting stuff just hiding it. Maybe add a button to the dropdown to send you to the jams page? Altough I would prefer adding it to the side of "store" button on the header, to promote the feature even more.
Consistent use of rich text. Maybe this is a more complex one to implement but I would like to use if not all, a limited set of rich text formatting functions (I understand the Headers are a little bit spammy) on forum threads and posts not only game descriptions. The typical bold, italic, link, etc.
Option to link a game on a post, it's a recurrent topic the short ammount of characters for each post. A way to alleviate this is that instead of posting a link of a game when promoting is to add it via an special option like the current "Add article" or "Add poll", an "Add game" option would give more space for the actual content of the post without leaving the promotion aspect.

And that's all I can think of in the moment, I've returned to Gamejolt after years and this are the things that immediately stand out to me. If you're a developer please share your opinions on the features and maybe your own experiences aswell, I also will be waiting for the staff response. Have a great day!

Fernando @YLivay

over 3 years ago

Hey hey, thanks for taking the time!

I'm not sure how "official" my response is, we have a ton of things we have our hands full with at the moment so I don't know how soon we can address all of these points.

Either way, here's what I think:

The panel: I agree its a bit of a pain to use. It's currently the way it is due to technical limitations of the platform we're using to log these ticks. We might be able to improve on it but honestly it's going to be hard to prioritize. Still, i'll bring it up for consideration :)
Portfolio sites: In the past we've tried a bunch of these alternative browsing experiencing: We used to show a different layout for devlog games vs playable games. We experimented with autoplaying browser games on the game page if one was uploaded, and allowed the entire game description length to show uncollapsed with rich formatting to allow more customization, but ultimately these approaches flopped. Having an accessible, uniform design makes the site easier to navigate, more inviting to interact with and lowers the bar of entry. Sites were a compromise for exactly that. You'd have free reign to be as creative as you'd like and use that as the landing page to promote.
I wonder, would having the developer's games listed more prominently on your user portfolio make sense?
Jams: Jams have been fully assimilated into community competitions with a ton of improvements. For instance https://gamejolt.com/c/gamemaker/ogxgj
This allows participants to follow the jam, have meaningful discussions and share their progress using all the features we have on the site, and is also a better format for recurring jams since you can just keep tabs on the community and create a new competition :)
There's no public listing for competitions just yet, we have a few more cool features in the oven for them before we tackle this tho.
Rich Text: Where do you want to use rich text more freely? Post leads? In the past we had to put some restrictions on this because we used to support pushing post leads to other platforms on your behalf but iirc we don't do this anymore. This might be a good time to revisit what we can or can't do in the post leads
Linking Games: Big yes. I also want that for posts, communities, competitions and other stuff as well.

Thanks for the feedback, it helps us prioritize things :)

AFTERWORLDSTUDIOS @AFTERWORLDSTUDIOS

over 3 years ago

Yes! Competitions I've been waiting all my life to take on Rockstar on a head to head development battle haha, would be cool tho.

Besides that I think there will always be millions of things that can be improved anywhere on anything but I think it's important to focus on the here and now, like what helps people the most at this point in time. Other cool features can be added on the side if you know what I mean.