Oh, so in addition to showcasing its success, it should have a clear list of engine features, like Unreal's or Unity's, which BYOND kind of does (thanks to Forum_account). It just needs to do it all better than it already is... or we could do it ourselves, like FA did, since Lummox is busy enough as it is.
I don't think BYOND is really trying to advertise its games, nor should it.
One of the main points of the original post is that the fact that BYOND provides a space for a minimal hub page seems to prevent anyone from marketing their own games on their own.
Unity has this: https://madewith.unity.com
Everything listed there includes a very basic description, but, most importantly, links to the game's own website.
BYOND hubs also provide all of that and more. I don't think there's anything wrong with providing the option to have a hub and take advantage of hub services.
None of Forum_account's pages represent a clear and concise list of features. They just look like pages taken from some kind of guide. It should be something that fits on the home page.
Kaiochao wrote: I don't think BYOND is really trying to advertise its games, nor should it. Kaiochao also wrote: Unity has this: https://madewith.unity.com The BYOND hub is a form of advertisement. It either has a hub or it doesn't. There is no in-between. I can't figure out your opinions on this. | |
Ter13, the fact that all you can do is personally attack me shows just how insecure you really are. I am being more helpful in this thread than you are. You are just trolling at this point. Pointing out your lack of financial, creative, or volunteer contributions is not a personal attack. #TacoSalad | |
I have a slightly different perspective. I think the fan game community of old was a fetal form of something that could have grown into an opportunity to show off the engine. Since several years ago, fan games have been demonized around here. I feel embarrassed for even admitting to the fact that I still have ambitions to rekindle my Megaman project as a hobby. In fact, fan game projects are what largely pushed me onward in the past. If you look back at old development posts of mine, I was working on Zelda and Megaman fan projects. I was never -really- serious about them, but I was always pushing myself because the projects were a fun and relatively easy way to improve my programming and design abilities. And they did big time. But the demonization of fan games largely led to my pursuing "real" projects, losing drive, and ultimately not working on much of anything at all. And at the end of the day, yeah that's my fault, but it's partly the fault of the community putting out that fire for a lot of developers.
For awhile, I was seeing fan projects popping up all the time that were really pushing for higher standards. They stood out from the every day Zeta rips and pushed for better interface design, graphics, and gameplay. This was something I felt like was getting better and better. The games weren't "good" by any real world means, but they were improving. Even though fan games can't and shouldn't support a community like this, it was the reality and I actually felt like there was a growing interest in higher standards. But then everything was purged. We were left with exactly what I thought we'd be left with -- a few subpar games and then some shitty anime games pretending to be original so they'd get listed on the site. That hasn't change a bit. The site is completely stagnant whereas there was actually some semblance of growth and pushing forward by a lot more people back before the entire fan game community was squashed. I don't think anything's ever going to change until we open up the community to just be itself again. We've been the way we are for several years now and not a damn thing has changed. The rips are still around and they always wil be, but a hell of a lot of growing developers felt completely marginalized by an overblown and unnecessary reaction to the DMCA. So there's my unpopular opinion for the day. | |
I still don't see what's difficult about creating a Zelda or Megaman fan-game without infringing.
I mean look at Land of Fire. It doesn't take a genius to realize it's heavily inspired by Naruto. However, it's not a Naruto game. NEStalgia. Doesn't take a genius to know it's inspired by Dragon Warrior/Quest. However, it's not a Dragon Quest game. EPOCH is heavily inspired by Dark Souls. It's not a Dark Souls game. And the constant excuse is always "oh, well, if I don't use their IP, I'm not going to get any players! my game won't succeed!" Tell that to Silk and Yut Butt who have made thousands. And the "fan-game" hate has never really been towards the fan-games themselves. It's been against the ungrateful idiots who create them, who steal and leak each other's sources, who flooded up the Live Games page with copy/paste Dragon Ball garbage for years until the C&Ds and then logged into original games being hosted at the time and spammed them in retaliation, who tell you you're an asshole the moment you even remotely criticize their "work" ( as if copy/pasting code was work to begin with ), who used blogs to talk about CSS and bald men in diapers, THIS is why people generally don't want to hear about fan-games. When I joined BYOND, the first game I played was a Dragon Warrior fan-game made by Unknown Person. Do you know why I liked UP and his Dragon Warrior fan-game? Because it had actual game play and not a self train verb. Because he wasn't accepting "donations" for in-game privileges. Because he actually knew the language and didn't just buy a Dragon Warrior source code from his 10 year old buddy down the street. Because he actually asked for permission first before creating a Battle for Wesnoth clone. Because he didn't make blog posts whining about "fan-game discrimination" or "bias mods" - in fact I can't recall him participating in any drama thread ever. Because his IQ wasn't in the single digits. UP and the average fan-game herpaderp on this site are polar opposites. If that wasn't the case, there'd be a lot less "hate" going around. Like honestly, outside of the "MY GAME WON'T GET NO PLAYERS" bullshit excuse, what's like, a legitimate reason as to why you HAVE to use the IP? Other than like, laziness. There are SO many Zelda-inspired games on the Android and iOS store it's not even funny and a lot of them are successful. They just took the game play mechanics from Zelda, drew their own characters and wrote their own story line and voila - a game that doesn't infringe and can be profited from legally. | |
It's not about getting more players. It's about having the resources and the passion for the IP to dive right in and start making a game. It's not even about being a serious developer. BYOND caters to the people first starting out development, and an easy way to do that is by making fan games. The more you improve on your fan projects, the more you may be led to pursue an original project. It happens all the time. Why should I have to invest so much extra time and money to try to make original project after original project when my real passions are leading me to have some fun with fan projects at the time? There's nothing wrong with it if my intentions are good and I'm not stealing code and calling it my own. If anything, I think it would enrich this community more to open itself up to that.
I've already stated my case. Feel free to look at it as laziness. But you can see plainly how your mentality has helped the community here so far. | |
I shouldn't say this, but Empirez makes a good case.
Fugs, you make a good case. You two don't seem to be disagreeing though: Fangames can be fun if they aren't lazy copy-paste garbage with no gameplay. Most of our existing fangames are just straight cashgrabs. Even some of the ones explicitly claiming to not be fangames. | |
im with fugsnarf but its too late to fix what happened with the fangames lol the site/engine probably wont ever be as popular as it was back then
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That's an even worse excuse! "I have to use their IP because I'm passionate about that IP!"
The guy who made Mighty #9 was passionate about Megaman too! Where is his infringement? It's literally  THAT easy. What I'm saying is you can make a game about a blue robot jumping around shooting other robots without making an actual Megaman game. No one's telling you not to be passionate about a particular game or not to be heavily inspired by one. I was just watching Yut's stream like 2 days ago. Do you know where he got inspiration for one of his character's animations? Zelda. He pulled up a Link sprite sheet from Minish Cap and was like "ohh, so that's how they did it" and then started creating a roll animation for his character. Yet, he's not making a Zelda fan-game. When he finishes whatever he's making, it's going to be his own IP inspired by whatever games he's passionate about - and apparently you both like Zelda so there's really no excuse as to why he can do it ( or better yet, everyone outside of this community ) and you can't. This is the only gaming community I can find where everyone is like "ermegerd, making original shit is too hard, all I can do is copy and paste code and copy and paste sprite sheets", it's literally pathetic at this point honestly and the fact that that mentality was allowed to run rampant since this site's creation is why no one takes us seriously. It's why I stopped taking everyone here seriously outside of like, 3 people. When you mention BYOND anywhere on the internet, the immediate response is "oh, that dumbass engine 12 year olds use to make Naruto games?" Stereotypes exist for a reason. | |
The way I see it is, if your passions are pushing you toward a fan project, you should look at what aspects of that are driving your passion. Why are you a fan? What is it about it that you like? If you can look at your love of the material in depth and puzzle out what makes you love it so much, you can find your passion in those elements and tropes, which are free for anyone to use, rather than in the whole that belongs to somebody else.
This even applies to settings and characters within a franchise. Don't write a Star Wars fangame because you love Boba Fett; write a sci-fi game where characters like Boba Fett can thrive. Look at why you like specific characters. The deeper you look, the more you'll learn. For example, I'm a huge fan of Firefly, because anyone who isn't a fan of Firefly is wrong. What do I like about it? It's a complete sci-fi setting with heavy intrusion of western elements; it has beautifully written characters; it has interesting plot arcs, most of which sadly never had a chance to develop. How would Firefly translate to a game? Trading, evading patrols, running heists, finding odd jobs, managing a crew. Well heck, I can write my own setting with all of those elements, and I know if I did it well it'd pull in other Firefly fans; moreover, I know that I'd have a passion for that game, because it'd bring out the sense of sharing in a similar struggle. StarGate fangames used to be pretty popular. The basic game mechanics remain: explore, fight, broker treaties, solve puzzles, follow story arcs. A StarGate fan could write a compelling game built around non-trademarked space portals and godlike aliens, and they'd find it rewarding to develop a universe with parallels to one(s) they already love. The ultimate fangame is not a fangame at all. It's a game in which the author was inspired enough to strike out in a similar direction. NEStalgia, EPOCH, and LoF are doing exactly that, and doing it well. | |
I agree with both of them to some level.
The laziness and copy-paste garbage and super low standards are not good for the engine, but marginalizing all fangames to try to combat the laziness and copy-paste garbage is not good for the community, which is not good for the engine. | |
Fangames can be fun, but it's very rare to actually find a fun fangame made with BYOND. Most "fun" fangames are standalone and have never had anything to do with BYOND. The most successful fangames will always be those that are based on something that is already a game to begin with.
With that said, fangames cannot stand up to higher legal powers, once they are discovered, and neither would BYOND if it had any association with them. That's why BYOND was obligated to purge many fangames from its hub. However, it was the combination of both removing fangames from the hub and removing blogs that badly hurt this community. If those things were removed more gradually instead of all at once, it might have minimized the damage, but there's no going back now. At this point BYOND's community has essentially been broken up into post-apocalyptic factions. The individual game communities are no longer united under BYOND, because it has pushed them away. What's left here on the website is a small core group that I think has a lot of similarities to the one that existed in the very beginning of BYOND's history, although I wouldn't know for sure, as I wasn't aware of BYOND back then. It's a lot like this small BYOND community is starting over from zero, which might actually be a good thing. The removal of many fangames from the hub and the removal of blogs has created a massive power vacuum, and it's up to original game developers to fill it before the fangames regain control. The fangames have already started to make a comeback. One way for original games to gain an advantage is for them to make use of a common inter-server communication system, which could allow for global chat rooms and a rebirth of blogs in virtual form. This would also reduce hub dependence. How could we actually get various original BYOND games to adopt a common standard of inter-server communication without making it a built-in feature? | |
WE MUST STAND TOGETHER AND FIGHT THE FANGAMES
Is all I got from that | |
The fangames are here to stay. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to themselves. BYOND is only good for its fangames.
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The removal of blogs had virtually nothing to do with a decline in interest on the website. It did nothing to bring in new users ( Tom said the traffic coming in to both blogs and guild pages was almost non-existent ) and that membership sales were already low in the first place so it's not like we missed out on thousands upon thousands of dollars by taking blogs away ( which is what everyone seems to believe ). Blogs were literally cesspools of ignorance and shit storms that were a headache for Tom, Stephen, and whoever else was moderating at that time and I was glad to see them go ( the blogs, not Tom and Stephen ).
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I can agree that blogs were too hard to maintain, but it's a generalization to say that all of the blogs were bad. I'm sure there were many that brought something of value to the community. Just don't blame the blogs themselves. Blame the stupid people that ruined them.
It's not that the removal of blogs directly lead to the decline, but it changed people's perceptions and scared them away. They probably thought that the removal of blogs was only the beginning, and that it would eventually lead to the decline and removal of the rest of BYOND's services. Everyone lost faith in BYOND, and that's why most of the community left the website. Perceptions are everything. They can make or break any business. | |
It's an accurate generalization. Most of the people using the blogs were horrible.
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This is how you advertise an engine.
This is how you advertise games.
BYOND tries to do both, but doesn't do it very well.