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Itch.io Community Services

A topic by NightBlade created Jun 03, 2018 Views: 1,085 Replies: 27

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NightBlade6 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Hi,

I'm a bit new to itch.io. I ported all my games over but I'm struggling a bit because I have a small player base. There seem to be other games/devs in a similar situation, and Itch seems to have a strong community, so I wonder if we can do more to help each other out.

I have a couple of ideas below:

Ratings Thursday: A lot of us have games with no ratings. Every Thursday, we find a few games with no ratings (we can share the list here), and play/rate them.
Feedback Fridays: If you ever wanted feedback on your itch.io page or a specific part of your game, you can post it, and hopefully someone can play it and give you feedback.

What do you think? Is this something you would be willing to be a part of (from the rater/feedback-giver side)?

I can always start doing these things myself (with the Itch randomizer!), but I think it would be more helpful and impactful if a number of us do this together.

Edit: one technical hurdle is that I can't seem to figure out how to find unrated games; only the "Top Rated" filter seems to list ratings at all.

leafoAdmin6 years ago(+1)

I'd be happy to see regular events on our community that encourage people to promote games. If you're going to be asking people to rate games though please don't just use it as a voting ring. Ratings should be honest as always. If there's anything I can do to help you get any of your ideas started say so.

NightBlade6 years ago (1 edit)

I'm trying very hard to avoid voting rings. There's always a temptation (if someone rated you well) to rate them back well, or to revenge-vote (if someone rated you poorly).

It doesn't look like there's any community interest yet, so I'll start with something simple. Is there any way to see (others') games that are not rated? I can only see find my unrated games easily, and games that are top-rated.

NightBlade6 years ago

Just wanted to follow up and see if there's any way to see unrated games. I tried browsing, and apparently "Top Rated" is the only view that even shows ratings to begin with. Without this, I'm blocked; any idea how I can achieve this?

Megaflops6 years ago(+1)

I like this idea. How about starting small, selecting a single (unrated, or dubiously rated) game for the participants to play, discuss, rate and review each week (or every two weeks)? Anyone could nominate a game (not one of their own), but only one user gets to pick the game to review. I suppose we could then notify the maker(s) of the selected game before we begin, in case they don't want that kind of attention. As the topic starter, NightBlade could choose the first game. Then every week the current game picker could pass on the game-picking baton to one of the users who participated the previous week, in a round-robin fashion.

NightBlade6 years ago (1 edit)

I thought a lot about this the last few days, and you bring up some good points. Here's what I'm thinking:

Ratings are very niche on Itch right now. You can only see them one view (Top Rated), and they're going to be revamped soon anyway.
It's imperative to rate honestly (to not create a voting ring/gang). Therefore, it's better to rate something good (if you like it), or not to rate it at all if you don't (unless we have 3-4+ people rating each game).
Feedback is more valuable to developers anyway; especially if they want feedback on specific things (eg. a specific mechanic, a specific level or weapon).
As you brought up, it's better to let people submit their/others' games than to randomly pick something.

What I had in mind is that a few people submit games, and a few people pick/critique whatever games from that list they find interesting. I think this would avoid most of the problems above, but still be useful for game developers.

What do you think?

There's also a list of developers on Twitter asking for feedback on their Itch games. We can engage them, and/or use that as the list of games to rate to start. Maybe.

Megaflops6 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

I agree that insightful and actionable feedback is more important than ratings. A five-star voting system with no subcategories provides very little information.
I'm concerned about this becoming yet another vehicle for self-promotion. That's why I'm not keen on letting people nominate their own games. That at least one person who isn't the developer cares about the game is a reasonable bar to set, IMO. If someone sees someone else asking for feedback and thinks their game is worth nominating, then that's fine, of course.
If each participant picks a game on their own, won't this become a lot like the "Recommend a game" board? For me, this is as much about getting some discussions going as providing feedback to developers. With all the talent that's gathered here, I find it a little sad that 90% of the activity on the boards is advertising and requests for support. Have the conversations moved to Discord and Twitter and all that newfangled stuff? I'm a forum guy, myself.

NightBlade6 years ago

Okay, let's try it. I guess the implicit assumption is that the game developers will read our comments/feedback/etc. We may not get feedback on our feedback, but that's cool.

I actually don't mind if you pick first. I haven't really looked at many games on Itch yet, other than my own.

Megaflops6 years ago

I've looked at a few, at least. Away Team by Underflow Studios is an interactive fiction adventure in space with some graphical elements. I started playing it a while ago, but stopped due to lack of time and a few annoyances, like text that occasionally wouldn't scroll. The story and concept of the game still intrigues me, so if you're up for it then we can start there. The minimum price is $2, is that OK?

NightBlade6 years ago (1 edit)

Since we're just starting out, sure, that's okay. But if I can put some restrictions, I would suggest:

Free games only. (Otherwise, if this picks up momentum, it'll be another easy self-promotion / free-sales thing to spam.)
We should avoid genres either or both of us really don't like.

For me, IF and visual novels are not my thing. At all. But since we're starting, that's cool.

I'll make an "official" week 1 thread for this shortly and we can use this thread to coordinate stuff.

Sounds good?

Oh, and although it's not required, I plan to leave a comment and/or rating on the game itself for developers, for any games that I end up playing because of this. Thanks for being the second person! This is now officially a "thing" :)

Megaflops6 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Free games only is alright. It's probably easier to get the ball rolling that way. I would actually have chosen a free game myself, if I had a good candidate available. It turned out that most of the titles in my collection were very short, already popular and/or not free.

I sympathize with your wish to not have to play games you just can't get into. If this takes off and a decent-sized pool of participants develops, then people skipping games that don't appeal to them shouldn't be a huge problem. If it ends up being just the two of us talking to each other, then frankly I'm not going to continue doing this, anyway. Taking part in community discussions is fine, but I'm not interested in being one half of a reviewer duo.

Commenting on the game pages or otherwise notifying the developers is a good idea, once we have something to show them.

So, should we stick with Away Team like you said or do you want me to go find a free, non-IF game? I could probably do that, if you give me a day. Nominating something yourself is also fine.

EDIT: I just ran into some missing DLL trouble trying to run Away Team on a Windows machine, so that's another reason why it might not be the best choice.

NightBlade6 years ago

Agree to all of the above. Hopefully this takes off and we have a bigger pool in a couple of weeks.

I'm fine with Away Team. How about: if you can't get it running in 24 hours, pick something else? Either is fine, let me know and I'll put it in the "official" thread.

BTW, Itch has a concept of Collections (I just learned about this recently). It's a good way to track games you want to check out later. I forgot that I have three games saved up in there.

Just to clarify, we're not doing this as a reviewer duo. We're just agreeing to play the same game at the same time and give the developer some sort of useful (detailed? actionable?) feedback on it.

Cheeseness6 years ago(+1)

Hi hi! One of The Away Team's devs here. Have you been in touch with us about the missing DLL issue you encountered? I don't do Windows myself, but I know that lead dev Michael will be super keen to hear about this and look into the issue ahead of the big update we have planned for (fingers crossed) later this month.

Underflow Studios6 years ago

Hey All,

Following up with what cheeseness said. I would love to know which DLL was missing. I will immediately fix this issue. I am so sorry there was a DLL missing. I'm going to guess it's probably the C++ redist DLL. On steam it installs some redists for us. On itch we don't have that option. I should package all third party dlls with the itch version and I thought I did... But maybe the C++ redist dll is missing. It may also be openal although I thought I got that DLL.

Lastly my email is always open for support issues at support@awayteam.space (this goes to my personal email so don't think you are sending an email into a support void. I usually respond within 16 hours business hours (48 hours real time).

Megaflops6 years ago(+2)

Probably OpenAL, yes. The error message I get (in a red-X dialog, immediately when I run "The Away Team.exe") reads

The code execution cannot proceed because OpenAL32.dll was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem.

The only DLLs in the install directory are

sfml-audio-2.dll
sfml-graphics-2.dll
sfml-system-2.dll
sfml-window-2.dll

View more in thread

Hyperlink Your Heart6 years ago(+2)

I'd be interested in participating in these, or similar. I've been trying to rate and comment on more games recently anyway, but getting involved on particular days would be cool.

Hyperlink Your Heart6 years ago

Since I also don't know how to find games without ratings, I'm going to nominate this LD41 game that I liked that only has one comment on it (which maybe also means that it has very few ratings?)

https://elgregos.itch.io/jump-push-match

NightBlade6 years ago

Thanks for showing interest! If you read the thread (I know, it's long), we decided to ditch ratings in favour of posting detailed feedback. I think we'll end up posting a couple of placeholder comments and/or ratings (comments are the important bit) and a link back to our weekly thread where we say "here's where we discussed it in detail."

Megaflops is finalizing the choice of game. Keep your nomination link handy for the second week/iteration of this.

Hyperlink Your Heart6 years ago

Ok, that makes sense, and I guess the criteria for choosing a game will be no/few comments then? There's a lot of back and forth in the thread above, but I guess it has also been decided to just focus on one game each week?

NightBlade6 years ago (1 edit)

We're going to go with games nominated by one person who's not the owner. Someone actually cares about that game. If you decide to nominate something that has no comments, that's cool, that's up to you; I would probably pick something that someone on Twitter mentioned as "please give me feedback" or something I thought looks interesting.

And yeah, we'll try for one game every 1-2 weeks and see how quickly people can respond.

Krunchy Fried Games6 years ago

Yeah, I'm always up for ways of getting more feedback and attention, and offering critique myself. Finding it harder to do on itch than other games sites (although, admittedly I haven't explored the site too much before). Some kind of constructive comments share would be a good idea- or set up some kind of informal group to trade ideas.

Personally, I'd be happy to trade a critique for a critique, or a follow for a follow anytime, but there don't seem to be too many effective ways to do this. Please keep me posted if anyone has any good ideas!

NightBlade6 years ago

You're welcome to join, although we're not doing any sort of review trade or anything like that. Just agreeing to review a third party game every week and discuss it in some detail together.

Krunchy Fried Games6 years ago

Ah, that's cool. Yeah, keep me postwed I'll try and review when I can- and offer this for consideration https://krunchyfriedgames.itch.io/witches-and-bandits-and-swords-oh-my

Megaflops6 years ago(+1)

Alright, here's some free stuff that might work:

Daybreak Empire - Strategy RPG. In development, demo released February 3, a handful of comments and a couple of videos. Ran without problems on my laptop.
Signal - Point and click adventure/puzzle game. Made in 48 hours for Global Game Jam 2018. One comment about being stuck on a puzzle. Worked like a charm on the laptop.
SUGAR! OVERKILL! - Run and gun action game. In development, demo released two days ago, has received three comments, one video. The game ran nicely on my not very new Windows laptop, only problem was that it wouldn't recognize my joypad.
Fell Seal - Another strategy RPG. In development, demo released August 27 last year. Five community threads. The graphics were flickering a lot on my laptop, and this game also failed to recognize the joypad.

We can pick the topmost entry on this list that isn't vetoed by anyone, or do a straw poll among the participants. Either approach works for me.

NightBlade6 years ago

Sounds good. I'll throw them into a Python script and let it randomly pick. Ok create an official "what are we doing" and coordination thread, and a new thread per game/week.

NightBlade6 years ago

Please spread the word about the current thread (#3). If this doesn't pick up, I will probably move on to other projects. (You guys are welcome to continue without me.)

NightBlade6 years ago

Would someone like to take over? I am not planning to put more time into this initiative.

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