Post by Colin EUMP in New User Experience is Crap

Viewing post in New User Experience is Crap

The file's name is "readme.md". The dragonruby.exe file, when run, refers to it as "readme.txt".

The first line of the engine's itch.io page says "DragonRuby Game Toolkit is a professional grade (yet beginner friendly) 2D game engine.". Notice the words in parentheses.

I only mentioned other game engines to point out how little sense it makes to refer to the "programming world" in the context of game engines.

Look, this product has a 47.31 USD price tag on it (for my area at least) and has been marked as "released" for almost a year. It shouldn't be beyond the same criticism that any commercial piece of software would get.

Zopolis43 years ago(+2)

First of all, there is a difference between beginner friendly and scratch. If you are incapable of looking up what a .md file is, that is in no way the developers fault. Just because the engine refers to a file by an incorrect extension, doesn't mean that the entire thing is worthless. You can open .md files with notepad, or really any other text editor. If the contents of the readme file are not to your exact liking, so what? If you don't want to use the engine, don't. If you have never seen a .md file before, that is not the developers fault. Beginner friendly does not mean that everyone will automatically understand everything. The entire base for this complaint is that you were unable at first to open a .md file, then when you opened it there were some lines of text that you did not like. If you are going on about having indie dev experience, then you should know what a .md file is. Nobody said it was your fault that the .exe referred to a file incorrectly. What was said is that it is not somebody else's fault that you are unable to look something up, or even try opening it.

Colin EUMP3 years ago(+1)(-3)

At no point was I unable to open the file. The initial problem was that I wasn't able to find the file, because it had the wrong name. And as I said in my initial post, I took a guess at what could open it once I noticed the file was there. Turned out notepad could. Have I done that before? Who knows. I don't keep track of every time I've had to deal with less familiar file formats, nor which operating system I had to deal with them on. It's very well possible I did so when I compiled the dependencies needed for the current custom C++ wrapper I've been using around SDL2. I just checked and one out of nine of them had a "README.md" without an accompanying "README" or "readme.txt". I guess that's not zero.

More importantly, have you actually read that file?

I didn't come here to complain, nor to call the engine "worthless". I came here to point out something that this game development tool failed to do that even less developed tools managed to do: be helpful.