Personal Update

ID:101632
 
Sep 8 2010, 12:50 pm
I've been hammering away on PopLava projects which involve creating a lot of demos, examples, and other assets. I ended up creating a Duck Hunt variation called Huck Dunt last night in about 5 hours. It turned out neat enough but the hit detection and rip-off part don't help its stand-alone cause. Anyway, it was just supposed to be a game demo for the Resource Center. Here's a shot of it.



With that random derailment out of way, I'm back to starting the V1.4 of the resource center. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, here's a shot of the catalog. The catalog is just one of the many screens in the Resource Center but it is the primary one.



Soo... with that underway, I keep looking over my shoulder at that casual contest. With just a couple weeks remaining, will I be able to change gears and get something done? I'm not so sure. The Resource Center is an exciting project with a lot going on. My submission is worthy though...

On a completely different line of thought... over the years, I have been frustrated with progress toward my visions and collaborative efforts. I've always felt like I was competing with an unseen force that had it out for me. It's like a group of people get together and pick apart my efforts and then proceed to derail them simply by dismissing what I do. Is it just paranoia or absolute failure on my part? I honestly beleive the answer is a little bit of both. I've let this entity get under my armor. I continuously open up and hope for lifting praise but instead get kicked in the teeth. I'm tired of that. I don't want to feel paranoid and I don't want to be frustrated.

So, I'm starting to march forward to a new tune. I need to beleive in what I'm doing and that needs to be enough. Negative spew and lack of feedback from the BYOND community needs to be put under acute perspective. My target audience is out there and they are waiting for me. It's time to focus my efforts and energy on reaching out to them. I truly think that by gauging my efforts within the BYOND community, I've done nothing but stick a plastic bag over my head and wondered why things are so foggy and suffocating.

My new pondering questions of the day... Am I working on projects that will reach the outside world? How do I know when I have done so? Can I do something which helps me gauge that specific effort?

ts
Sep 8 2010, 1:02 pm
The hit detection is just horrid, probably due to the slow mouse procedures. I suggest using the default Click() procedure. It would at least make the game playable.

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In response to your thoughts on BYOND vs. Tsfreaks, trust me, most of those who commented last week were not out to dishearten you. You simply did not provide enough information on Poplava and then expected people to jump at the opportunity and give you $5.

Negative spew and lack of feedback from the BYOND community needs to be put under acute perspective.

There are those, within this community, who are only here to put others down. Just ignoring what they have to say. Their joy is seeing you respond emotionally, if you do not provide them with such an reaction they will eventually go away. With that said, there are ways to gain more feedback!
Sep 8 2010, 1:45 pm
RJTaylor wrote:
The hit detection is just horrid, probably due to the slow mouse procedures. I suggest using the default Click() procedure. It would at least make the game playable.

It is using Click()... I think the problem is with the ducks being 64x64. I'll have to see if I can improve it.

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In response to your thoughts on BYOND vs. Tsfreaks, trust me, most of those who commented last week were not out to dishearten you.

I wasn't directly referring to that last PopLava post. I especially wasn't referring to that effort as an example. I should have clarified given the recent activity over there. This is just an overall feeling and its my own fault because I haven't seen past the bag yet.

You simply did not provide enough information on Poplava and then expected people to jump at the opportunity and give you $5.

I understand folks having an issue with it. I fully expected and I responded as appropriate (with additional information and eventually opened the beta). Again, I had not referred to that posting in any way although it would be easy to jump to that conclusion.

Negative spew and lack of feedback from the BYOND community needs to be put under acute perspective.

There are those, within this community, who are only here to put others down. Just ignoring what they have to say. Their joy is seeing you respond emotionally, if you do not provide them with such an reaction they will eventually go away.

It's more than just the trolls. It's like there's some sort of underlying individualistic agenda that seems to spew negativity all over everything and everyone.

With that said, there are ways to gain more feedback!

I'll take a gander at that post when I get a chance later this afternoon. Thanks for sharing it.

ts
Sep 8 2010, 2:13 pm
Is it just paranoia or absolute failure on my part?

To shed some light on the matter, your fiasco was mentioned in a certain place and some negative reception poured into its comments section, as does sometimes happen when you post things.
Sep 8 2010, 2:15 pm
Tsfreaks wrote:
It's more than just the trolls. It's like there's some sort of underlying individualistic agenda that seems to spew negativity all over everything and everyone.

For the most part, this community certainly will not support its developers. For some odd reasons, those who are developers rather point out some of the smallest flaws in a persons sentence, post, game, just to prove to themselves, mentally, that they are better. I simply just ignore them and I suggest you do the same. Perhaps you should try blog banning them.

There are some communities who do support indie developers:

Bay12
TIGSource
IndieGamer
Sep 8 2010, 2:20 pm (Edited on Sep 8 2010, 2:33 pm)
I do wholeheartedly recommend your migra tion to one of the communities RJTaylor mentioned, where you will be s
upported more fairly as a developer and,frankly, treated more fairly as a human being.
Sep 8 2010, 2:35 pm
I'm not sure if it's the hit detection in Huck Dunt that's the problem or the movement of the ducks. The movement is really jerky. You might want to consider using pixel movement to have finer control over how the ducks move.

As for the feedback issue: I'm really not sure what kind of feedback you expect to get. It sounds like you have things planned out in your head so completely that feedback would be unwelcome. You know what PopLava is and what you want it to be so you don't need to tell us because there is no need for discussion. This begs the question: why are you telling us about it?

Answer these two questions (not that you need to post answers, it's just for your benefit):
1. What type of feedback do you want? In other words, what do you want the feedback to be about?
2. What have you done to elicit that type of response?

It seems like you're looking for a "good job" pat-on-the-back type of response but you've done nothing to get it. You can say "I wrote 1000 lines of code for PopLava today" but unless people know what PopLava is they won't care. I'm not sure why you're so secretive about your projects but it seems to hurt your chances of getting the type of feedback you want.
Sep 8 2010, 2:38 pm
@RJTaylor: ...Oh sure. Say that after multiple requests for feedback. I voted yeah on those posts, dammit! ;)
Sep 8 2010, 2:47 pm
ACWraith wrote:
@RJTaylor: ...Oh sure. Say that after multiple requests for feedback. I voted yeah on those posts, dammit! ;)

I am sorry! I really do appreciate you commenting on my posts and I did come off like an asshole in my last comment.

There are those who do support others. You are certainly one of them, you provide the community with an overview of the current indie games in production. But you must have certainly noticed those whose sole purpose is to find a simple mistake in ones work and then blow it out of proportion. But I am certainly no better, I spend my time picking out some of the weak spots in this community and then also blow it out proportion, I need to focus on developing games.

I am not saying that the communities I recommended are troll-free, but from what I have seen, they tend to have more users who enjoy helping others out, instead of nitpicking.
Sep 8 2010, 3:55 pm
@RJTaylor: Heh, no offense was really taken. =)

I read threads that I'm occasionally linked to, but my interaction is unfortunately limited to just a few communities. I tend to get in on the ground floor. Earning credibility elsewhere before I don't feel like I'm spamming has been a bit intimidating and I have yet to develop the habit of visiting those sites regularly. =(
Sep 8 2010, 9:15 pm
Tsfreaks: With respect to the recent going-ons on the PopLava blog, at least, I have these comments to make:

As Toadfish mentioned, your post about the Resource Center testing was mentioned in a certain place because it looked suspicious. You had seemingly contradictory points (#4. ... wants to earn money ... and #6 ... send $5 via paypal) and #6 seemed fishy enough as it wasn't exactly explained at first what the $5 was for. It seemed rather fishy, so some of us got to exploring the PopLava blog along with your personal blog and noticed that pretty much everything you posted in respects to ANY project you were working on and PopLava was incredibly vague. Up until recently I thought the Resource Manager was a non-BYOND application because I had no reason to suspect otherwise and your posts didn't explain it. The diagram you did have was also confusing because it had a few things written on it and everything else was a bunch of ???.

After that long paragraph explaining absolutely nothing, my advice to you, as Forum_Account mentioned: Try to be more detailed where possible and people will generally be more receptive. If you think someone's going to steal your idea, you have two steps you can take:

1.) Wait until you've got a good portion of the game or application created (I don't like putting percentages on completion) so you have something to show. Then, your idea is good enough that someone will steal it, but they'll be discouraged by the effort they'd have to put into it for little gain seeing as how yours is "near completion".

2.)Remind yourself that it's BYOND. The people that DO have the talent to take your idea and produce something theoretically "bigger and better" are extremely slim.

This is all
Sep 9 2010, 12:22 am
You wrote that your 'target audience is out there', but what exactly is your target audience? I never saw you mention a detailed definition, which is actually one of the most common problems around BYOND. People rarely ever take the time to write out such 'trivial' things and then end up stumbling over these very issues, be it the lack of cratering for a specific subset of clientèle, or simply the convoluted project that arises out of not having a proper design document upfront.

The result is exactly what you are perceiving and describing, unwanted feedback.

I'll give you an concrete example.
RJTaylor mentioned a mindset that is often found in the BYOND RPG forum, namely the feeling that the developers would 'point out some of the smallest flaws in a persons sentence, post, game' and '(...)then blow it out of proportion'.
The reason for this misunderstanding is as simple as a faulty target audience definition. When you submit a game to BYOND RPG, you automatically say 'my game challenges the whole rest of BYOND, it earns a spot within the best of the best and I want mature people with a lot of experience on other games to enjoy playing my masterpiece of art'.
Most people submitting a game rather think that they just gain a few more beta testers for their quick and dirty production though, so naturally those two mindsets collide and while the second would consider something completely out of proportion, it is certainly valid for the first.
Talking at cross-purposes is one of the weak spots in BYOND's community, in my humble opinion.


I fully agree that it's 'time to focus [your] efforts and energy on reaching out to [your target audience]', because once you have that set, your communication problem should cease. That would make for a nice next blog post in my eyes and I wish you all the best luck and hope to read some more of you soon!