This is taken from another post on the forum, with the filler removed. Seems to fit better here.



Resolution Needs fixing.
+ 1000 for basic resolution support. There should be a common sense resolution solution for DM by default. This is basic, basic stuff that any game development suite should have--it shouldn't be something that developers have to continually build work-around custom solutions to include.

Programming Aides

People nowadays do not like to read and calling them lazy when there are less time consuming and more interesting learning aids is actually what's lazy. The internet is a visual tool-- so consider video tutorials or something along those lines. People will be more receptive to them, which in turn will cause an increase in activity and game development.


Community Improvement

There's a very small group of people inadvertently strangling the livelihood of the site by being biased against anything anime related, which is directly at odds with the very thing keeping you alive at the moment.

Fact is you have a certain demographic of people this website caters to. Anime games which are being so vehemently attacked are essentially the only thing keeping a steady stream of people coming here. None of the "elite" devs are sticking around, opting to move on.

The problem is....

I've never , to date, seen any of the "leaders" of this community denounce this behavior publicly.

An exclusive community isn't working. No games are being developed that have seen the light of day or made any sort of impact to the community.
You exclude people who might stick around otherwise when they see your behavior. If you look at places like Unity and Steam, they don't have anything close to the level of toxicity this community allows for.

Ironically this is one of the simplest things to fix. Build accountability into your website so that people will think twice about being idiots. This basically means allowing others to see what crappy actions, comments and such they've said, or perhaps some kind of karma system as well.

I can't tell you how many people I've met or introduced into this community who then turn right back around and leave--and these aren't kids. These are serious game devs who see the potential, but leave because frankly its often not worth it on their part when there are better options for making games with less hassle (development and community wise). In short, shooting yourselves in the foot so to speak.

Improving Your Cash Flow
Including hosting services with memberships would vastly improve the willingness of people to buy memberships, which in turn gives you revenue.

If a member could host at least 1 game of their choosing in conjunction with your membership without the need to pay for hosting, you'd see a huge increase in activity on the website since hosting is a major deterrent towards building an active website. This would also solve the problem of membership being worth more.

You could also then tie in maybe the ability to host more than 1 game on a key by offering different levels of memberships. For instance, year long memberships include the ability to host up to 3 games. (Just to be clear, I'm not saying restrict the ability to host games to members only, though that would increase membership sales as well.)

I'm aware that this would require a lot of time and effort, so I understand if it's not feasible or even an option--but this is a bit of forward thinking on my part.

This has also been done to great effect on other websites similiar to BYOND like RoBlox. (Yes these games look like shit, but devs are easily making thousands of dollars a month making them so...--results matter most)

Less Control--allow BYond to Grow or it WILL die.
I really feel that, as a whole, there is this mindset that the community has to be "controlled" and because of that, you are inherently limiting yourself.

You either have a influx of people or you don't-- but I think right now the reason you don't is because there are a lot of notions about exercising control over your current system that really keeps byond from growing into BYOND.

One huge example of it is the missing ability to create an EXE file for your games.

If promotion and community involvement is an issue, making an EXE option built into Dream Maker would be the perfect way to remedy that problem.

Put a splash screen on all the games the EXE generator option uses, and that's that--bam as your games spread across the net, for better or worse, you gain promotion and people might visit. Those people might in turn contribute, as long as they aren't met with ignorance and malice.

You could also tie THAT into the membership, disabling the EXE option unless the user has a paid membership.