game-editor.com

I don't expect that post to be popular or result on nice comments, it's just my opinion of a guy that want to make game. I can't pretend to be a coder or artist, but a amateur - beginer, yes I am.

It look like alot of people tryed GE, but after a few days decided it was not for them. Some suggestions that could help people to stick around, It just don't sound right, you got 3 platform: linux, mac and pc the engine run on. You export on linux, mac, pc, iPhone. Just iphone it's quite enough for engine like Gamesalad to be sucessfull.


On the main page have a icon say BETA. That will excuse you for all bugs people can find. Gamesalad is still mentionning BETA, while they had 25 peoples making the top 100 on the appstore. That mean those games made alot of money.

Would be to make a list of what GE dose not. And why. Ex: dose not rotation cause ...

Change the logo and the name, but game editor name and logo is not appropriate.

A list of know bugs.

A list of what is supported or not.

Fix the bugs in 1.4 and geplayer before getting to 1.5 There is alot of pc users out there that would like to be able to make a game on their pc and test on a device without spending 500$ on a mac.

Drop linux. It's like 1% of people that have a desktop use it.

Transform the engine to use little nice icons, people like that, it make it look easier.

Change the website to a white background. And put some cute animals, why not, it attract people. You need to attract people.

Show clearly what to who the engine is designed for.

Focus on artist that know nothing about coding. Gamesalad and stencylwork are sucessfull because of that and they attractive wesite.

Be ready to help beginners and artist and all non-coders Don't expect they will just read the whole forum it's not efficient.

Drop the development of the engine time by 75% and put that 75% of your time and money on redesigning the documentation, put all your money to to hire a good designer to make the logo and the website and answer questions in the forum, and on the chat.

If people feel the website look attractive, they have questions answered nicely, they feel welcome and their game are going forward. There is no reason they will go elsewhere.

Cut and paste literaly StencylTv http://www.stencyl.com/help/viewArticle/105/ Just answer the same questions, the same way: with video tutorials. Just call it Game-Editor tv. A image worth 1000 words, and a video 1 millions. That guy is not fluent in english (like me ) but still he help alot of peoples, look at one

Code: Select all

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeddiS2PEyM

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It make the engine beginner friendly.


Force user when they uninstall GE to load a page on their browser, saying we are sad you are leaving, please tell us why. Simple. Big company dose it. So you will know for sure why they are leaving and can reorient the development.


[b]Stop thinking like coders, think like artist and beginners. It mean don't ask yourselves what you want to see in the engine, or what top coder users in the forum want, but what beginners and artist want. [/b] Why gamesalad and stencylwork is the choice for artist and beginners in 2D. Come on: it's easy to use and mention no coding. Even stencyl you can code, but they mention only if you want to.

Make some game template, accessible to download, so people can merge them with their game.

Commit to change the course, cause it's not going in the right direction It's not getting android port that will make you suceseffull. Look at Stencylwork, they are killing gamesalad right now, they are getting near 10,000 new users monthly, they don't have android yet. Look their coding system with blocks, it just awesome for beginners and artist. Gamesalad and Stencylwork where sucessfull before getting android port.



Cause if you don't change, you will continue to have the same result.

Clokio wrote:It look like alot of people tryed GE, but after a few days decided it was not for them. Some suggestions that could help people to stick around, It just don't sound right, you got 3 platform: linux, mac and pc the engine run on. You export on linux, mac, pc, iPhone. Just iphone it's quite enough for engine like Gamesalad to be sucessfull.

The fact that gE supports all three major operating systems is why a lot of users have come here.

Clokio wrote:On the main page have a icon say BETA. That will excuse you for all bugs people can find. Gamesalad is still mentionning BETA, while they had 25 peoples making the top 100 on the appstore. That mean those games made alot of money.
Would be to make a list of what GE dose not. And why. Ex: dose not rotation cause ...

Admitting to your faults, while less surprising to users if they see features not implemented that they expected, is generally a deterrent. It's kind of like saying here's why this game isn't the best (why would you play the game if they tell you all its faults?). And while saying its a beta is harmless, maybe even helpful, we don't actually have the developer backing for it to really be a beta. Honestly speaking we have two developers, that can't spend all their time working to improve gE. While 1.5 has a few of gE's bugs fixed, the export options have been determined to be a more valuable use of time for the small dev team.

Clokio wrote:Change the logo and the name, but game editor name and logo is not appropriate.

This has been brought up, and turned down by makslane. So, while some agree it's a good idea, I really doubt the name will change anytime soon. The splash screen is most likely going to get some work done on it.

Clokio wrote:A list of know bugs.
A list of what is supported or not.

Same thing as the above about admitting to your faults. I do agree there should be a place where all bugs are listed. There are two places, the official one being on the sourceforge download site, the other being on the forums. http://game-editor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10516

Clokio wrote:Fix the bugs in 1.4 and geplayer before getting to 1.5 There is alot of pc users out there that would like to be able to make a game on their pc and test on a device without spending 500$ on a mac.

As I mentioned above, some fixes were made, and multitouch was implemented. Improvements in this direction have been made but it would be impossible for all bugs to be fixed, we just don't have the man power to do that. The physics implementation is adding loads of new features that have been requested again and again in gE. This is what people have wanted, and it will help attract more users.

Clokio wrote:Drop linux. It's like 1% of people that have a desktop use it.

You might not guess it, but quite a few users here are linux users. The reason a lot of us found gE was because its one of the only really good 2d game tool for linux. And now with android being supported, the number of linux users would increase. Why drop linux? Definitely over 1% of users on gE are linux users. Despite me wanting the best for gE if linux was dropped, I know I'd leave.

Clokio wrote:Transform the engine to use little nice icons, people like that, it make it look easier.
Change the website to a white background. And put some cute animals, why not, it attract people. You need to attract people.

If you could provide appealing graphics please do. One of the reasons the pacman and the rest of the interface hasn't changed is that we have no other options (also the lack of developers). Though, I don't see fluffy animals on any of the other game tools websites, excluding the few flash ads showing games made with the tool (of which currently gE has very few).

Clokio wrote:Show clearly what to who the engine is designed for.
Focus on artist that know nothing about coding. Gamesalad and stencylwork are sucessfull because of that and they attractive wesite.
Be ready to help beginners and artist and all non-coders Don't expect they will just read the whole forum it's not efficient.

Who might that be? gE's true power over the other engines is the scripting capacity. While it would be nicer if it was more user friendly, we don't have the resources to make such drastic changes. You might not know, but the new interface that was in the works before makslane stopped, was supposed to implement features that would make scripting much easier for artists. And since we don't have any developers working on it, there's not much we can do on that front. If you have connections with developers that can do this kind of work, please tell them about gE. We could use some more helping hands.

Clokio wrote:Drop the development of the engine time by 75% and put that 75% of your time and money on redesigning the documentation, put all your money to to hire a good designer to make the logo and the website and answer questions in the forum, and on the chat.

What money? gE doesn't make enough money to really hire that kind of work. If there was that kind of income from gE it'd be much easier for that to happen, but we can't expect makslane and akr to pay out of their own pockets to that extent. All the time they've poured into gE is worth quite a bit, considering their skills and background. I doubt they've received nearly close to enough to compensate themselves appropriately, let alone hire new help. We have to do what we can to get gE more popular before that action can be done. However we are thinking of implementing a new form of help to make everything run smoother. If I could excuse my work with gE as a paying job, I'd definitely be able to improve the documentation, but we have our lives away from gE, which takes precedence. But without due compensation, there is no way we can poor the amount of time and work that would be required to do a complete revamp into gE. I wish I could.

Clokio wrote:If people feel the website look attractive, they have questions answered nicely, they feel welcome and their game are going forward. There is no reason they will go elsewhere.

This is true.

Clokio wrote:Stop thinking like coders, think like artist and beginners. It mean don't ask yourselves what you want to see in the engine, or what top coder users in the forum want, but what beginners and artist want. Why gamesalad and stencylwork is the choice for artist and beginners in 2D. Come on: it's easy to use and mention no coding. Even stencyl you can code, but they mention only if you want to.
Make some game template, accessible to download, so people can merge them with their

The feature requests that are being worked on are not only of "top coder"s. Physics is a feature that any iphone dev now expects in their engine. Most work that the devs have been doing are for android and physics. If we had a developer who could finish the new interface (which would take an extensive amount of work for a single person) we would do so. But again it has been determined the physics had the overwhelming support, as it allowed for rotation and the like, not to mention it was far more plausible for akr to implement it rather than try altering all of gE by himself. And the users here have been attempting to make templates, and some are pretty nice. So I'd say there is some progress on that end, and pretty decent considering it's all out of their own desire to help.

Clokio wrote:Commit to change the course, cause it's not going in the right direction It's not getting android port that will make you suceseffull. Look at Stencylwork, they are killing gamesalad right now, they are getting near 10,000 new users monthly, they don't have android yet. Look their coding system with blocks, it just awesome for beginners and artist. Gamesalad and Stencylwork where sucessfull before getting android port.

While android isn't going to make everything better, a lot of interest has been voiced about gE supporting it. We can't just try to copy other game engines, they'd win. Why would gE look more appealing that any of those other tools? That's the kind of thinking we need. Us just trying to copy what other tools have already done, especially when we are out manned in terms of developers, would be a losing battle. Android is something they don't have, and may attract more developers. For a while now makslane has been trying to attract more developers, and to that end we would need to have features that developers would find interesting or useful. So while getting artists interested is great for popularity, we can't implement nearly enough for that to happen without having more people on the gE team. And the easier gE version for artists I mentioned did have plans for a block coding system.

Clokio wrote:Cause if you don't change, you will continue to have the same result.

This is true, and thanks for taking the time to post this. I don't mean to say everything you said is wrong, the more opinions out there the better. I'm just trying to shed some light on gE's actual predicament. A lot of the things you suggested have been discussed, and we'd love to act on them if we could.

Thanks skydereign, it's now clearer to me the situation.

Drop linux. It's like 1% of people that have a desktop use it.

I've been in big companies and offices that use only Linux. And I'm studying in a university where their own version of it, is installed as main OS on every computer. Also, supporting open source is also ethically a good thing. It reached quite a popularity in a short time and the amount of users is growing fast.

GE is not very hard to use. I have worked with other stuff making games for x box,ps ect and there you will be completely lost. If all the things on the next GE will have what I hope it will then GE will just need a visual make over when you are working on it. I think it should have more colorful buttons. For example if you go to add Draw>Script the icon for Draw could have a ball moving with a trail on it to make it look like it's constantly drawing and the Script icon could have a keyboard to make the user know this is where you will be using the keyboard to type in your code. I would gladly help make some new icons for this. I could take a couple of hours every week to makes some for the next GE after the new one that is coming out this year. The only thing I would need is a list of icons and peoples opinion one what would best describe that function.

I for one believe that we should think like coders because that is what makes GE feel special and right for me. Honestly I dropped GM the first day because I felt it was babying me too much and I needed something with POWER!!!

Just as example here, a engine xyz have a actual bug list. It's nothing to be ahsamed of. It reduce time to seek for problems when it's not your fault. And if you are good enough in c++ you can fix it.
https://bitbucket.org/rude/love/issues

gE has an actual bug list. It is on the site with the source code. The problem is that no user here ever reports bugs to it. So they tend to post them here, and I add them to the tracker when I get the time. Until then they are also posted on the forums. All I said is that telling every potential user all the bugs before they try it out is a bad idea. I could list quite a few bugs in gE that would make people a whole lot less inclined to use it.

skydereign wrote:I'm just trying to shed some light on gE's actual predicament.

Is gE in some sort of bad situation? I realize there aren't many active users on the forum, and it doesn't seem to be hugely popular. I've seen a couple forum posts about this sort of thing, like "Does gE still suck", people offering to help with the logos and graphics and things like that. But is gE actually not being developed and improved upon? Or is it just in a slow pace because of low funds and lack of popularity? If so, I've got to make Night Knight amazing to spread the word of gE and help this community out!

happyjustbecause wrote:

skydereign wrote:I'm just trying to shed some light on gE's actual predicament.

Is gE in some sort of bad situation? I realize there aren't many active users on the forum, and it doesn't seem to be hugely popular. I've seen a couple forum posts about this sort of thing, like "Does gE still suck", people offering to help with the logos and graphics and things like that. But is gE actually not being developed and improved upon? Or is it just in a slow pace because of low funds and lack of popularity? If so, I've got to make Night Knight amazing to spread the word of gE and help this community out!

gE's current situation isn't anything close to ideal. Naturally we'd like to get it to be the best that it can be. This would mean increasing popularity and use of the forums, and increasing the size of the dev team. While the users on these forums are pretty understanding, we get a lot of comments/suggestions/criticisms that we can, at this time, do nothing about. Naturally people will be impatient or even frustrated with this, but we can only do so much. There are only three of us that do anything related to the source, and even then all work on gE is done in our free time.

happyjustbecause wrote:I've got to make Night Knight amazing to spread the word of gE and help this community out!

I look forward to it.

The answers are just what happy said. Finish awesome games and attract more. Hopefully some of those can help in GE development team. Maybe I could find a few for you guys. I may be a kid, but I am stubborn kid and won't give up on GE easily.

How about we all work together in creating a website called Resource Kingdom?

Well, let us start an objective list.

Video Team- One team will be the video team. A notorious team of people that creates videos of GE's greatest moments and posts it on youtube and websites. Apply if you would like this objective.

Internet Recruiters- Gos on the internet looking for the savvy developers to help the GE development team.

GE missionaries- People that go throughout web posting games, updates, and everything new about GE all over the web. Try to find some popular sites too.

Home recruiters- Look around your town and area for some people to recruit into the GE development team, or maybe even just some new people around the forum. (I got a possible two already)

The GE kingdom site- HBlade's idea. Work on the hugest, most awesome, spectacular website for GE ever. Everything you can should be there. I think some of the popular games should be on there, along with the monthly winner's games from my tournament, and weekend jam winners from phyzix's contest.

awesome

btw:
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/488/98031839.png

Some of the things the topic author said make sense. However, one should clearly distinguish between popularity and success. Success does not always mean popularity. Many open source developers consider having a product which does what they want a success. Many users consider having a free software product which does what they want or close to what they want a success also.

I would agree that better presentation might help. I agree that it would be nice to redesign a logo.

However, the best promotion for any type of game creating software are the games themselves. If the games are nice, people will get interested. Just as Nifflas made many people aware of Multimedia Fusion (you can look up Nifflas in wikipedia).

Working on the physics engine, imho, is much more important for the devs then doing some presentation work. If you want, do contribute to presentation, this is free software, work of the people.

Finally, dropping linux - hehe. The only reason I am here is that GE, being a very decent game creation software, supports linux. This is a killer feature for me.