TIGSource Forums

for a while i've (and others) had the feeling that a lot of great indie games get forgotten, unmentioned on blogs and enjoyed by only a few people. so i had an idea for something i could do for the frontpage: instead of long individual reviews for each game, i'd list a bunch of games at once, once a week. each would just have a screenshot and a sentence or two describing them. that way more games would get coverage on the frontpage, and fewer devs would feel left out

but because the community's wisdom is greater than mine i thought i'd post about this idea first to get feedback on it before i started it, and to see whether this is something that'd be useful / desired or not. so what do you all think?

If you want to do this, going for a list of the 'best' indie games isn't what I'd advise. I'd advise going for the most obscure games, released quietly and that very few people talked about. I'd also not tie myself to 10 games, which would force you to every week fill the list with 10 regardless if there were more games released that should be in it, or less games, forcing you to scramble trying to find more games to add.

yeah it wouldn't be 'best' in terms of quality or anything objective, but rather the 10 that i felt were the most interesting games of the week which didn't get their own individual post by derek

i also think there are so many games released each day that 10 per week may even be too little, but it's true that occasionally time constraints may prevent me from being able to play enough games per week to find 10 that i want to include, so perhaps i won't pick a particular number afterall

I think this is a good idea, mainly if you try to take games which weren't already featured (or maybe didn't get enough attention) on IndieGames.com, as I find that so far TIGS and IG.com nicely complement each other.
But, even if they are your personal favorite games of the week, I would refrain from calling them the "best" or "top" games and rather go for something less absolute, like "games you shouldn't miss" or so. Otherwise it might just spawn lots more of the needless arguments about how "game x would have so much more deserved to be featured here instead of stupid game y".

i agree but i think you'll get that no matter what. for instance, when i made my '100 game maker games in 10 minutes' video i explictly avoided saying that they were the best games or anything like that, yet people still complained that their favorite gm game wasn't chosen to be in the 100

1-yeah but don't restrain to "obscure" games, that would be stupid
2-You would have to be pretty exhaustive with all platforms and communities (iphone, gamemaker games, xblig, flash, etc...)
That would require several people.
3-Isn't this already what the frontpage is for?

well this would be for the frontpage, it's just that there's a lack of games covered there, mostly due to lack of time. i figure that reducing the requirement for a game to get posted to 'a sentence and a screenshot' would help more games get exposure there.

and i'll work with a few friends on it probably; ortoslon for example often tells me about new games to try out, so i'll be relying on him a lot of the time. i have xblig, the only one you mentioned which i don't have easy access to is iphone

(i mean, i do actually have an iphone which someone kindly sent me but it's like first gen and i've literally never used it / never bought a game for it, but i suppose i could learn)

and yeah i shouldn't specifically stick with obscure games, just that i'll restrict it to games that derek and the other editors didn't give individual reviews to. so there will probably be some overlap with timw's blog (but that should be okay since not everyone who reads tigsource reads timw's blog).

If you need any help Paul let me know; I come across games that I don't have time to review but still deserve a mention.

that'd be pretty helpful, thanks -- feel free to PM me them, or message me by IM or something with your suggestions any time

What I'd love to see is a very basic portal which showcases 8-12 indie games on the frontpage. Yeah, something like a clean flash portal template like that of www.ArmorGames.com.

Personally I feel templates are quite important. If a portal has a clean template I tend to visit it more often than a portal that looks like GameJolt (with all due respect to indies who use it and Cas himself!) which has a bit..messy template, or even portals like Kongregate and Newgrounds.

Now, I know, that's not what you are talking about here, but it still feels like that kind of frontpage would have more interest than a blog as I find blogs messy. There tends to be a lot of content that is of no interest to me so I tend to visit blogs less.

Perhaps games.tigsource.com? (TIGDb is a different thing, it's just a repository of random games that is less visited than something like a new games section + discsussion about each game)

But then again I'm just talking about myself.

In any case good luck with this! (:

I like interesting things. Anything which makes it easier to find interesting things sounds good to me!  ;D

(Ignore the complainers I guess. They could always suggest something they like if they feel that strongly..?)

I have a better idea, why don't we link TIGdb and TIGSource?

What I mean by this is, have the games on TIGdb appear on the frontpage of TIGSource. Games will be shown by random and will be categorized under "Games you might want to check". Not only will this solve the problem of featuring games, it might also revive TIGdb encouraging indies to update it with their games.

Also, less hassle on our part since it is done automatically.

What do you guys think?

i think that's an ok idea but it's kind of completely unrelated

the idea here is to cover more games, and to cover them in a more timely fashion, since that's one of the biggest complaints about tigsource currently

tigsource, the blog, actually covers more games than tigdb (which largely contains games that were once covered on the frontpage), so it wouldn't increase the number of games covered to link the two, so that would definitely not solve the problem of featuring more games, since all the games in the tigdb were featured already on the frontpage

Sounds perfect, I prefer that sort of thing.

Hmmm... I guess you're right. Sorry, I'm kinda new to the community and don't know how the web of TIG sites interconnect with one another.

Anyways, your idea of having a list would be a good idea. Everybody likes lists.

indeed  :)

This would be awesome. But I agree, don't call it "Top" or "Best". Call it like "Paul's Picks" or something.

"The Eres Report" would be awesome. :laughter:

:beer: :handthumbsupR:

i suggest to include unfinished but playable interesting games (screenshots + links to Feedback forum threads). i've already talked about this with paul, he agreed this is a good idea

I don't think you should bother about being "timely". There are so many interesting games released everyday that it would be impossible to talk of all of them "timely".

i agree and i could have a separate thing for missed classics, but part of the idea of this was to address complaints that tigsource covers games like 3 months after timw covers them (which is true a lot of the time). or perhaps 1 game out of the 10 each week could be a missed classic that i think needs more attention or something.

Would you make it a point not to include games already featured on indiegames.com? If so, I totally support this.

not necessarily a point, but i'll probably include some that timw covered and some that he didn't. there are a lot of people who read tigsource who don't read timw's blog, so i don't think going only for games he doesn't review is a good idea if those games are good and if they'd have an audience here

I, for one, would love to see just a non-evaluative weekly round-up of just-published titles. A list with the name, author, genre(s), link, a freeware/shareware/whatever flag, and a 1-2 line description.

Though compos and jams could make listing them a bear. Could probably write a script to automate the process and have the dev just fill out a form or fields in an email.

well, a complete list (as you seem to be recommending) would be virtually impossible to compile -- considering how many flash games, gmc games, mmf2 games, rpgmaker games, ohrrpgce games, and so on are released on all the different forums and places, the number of indie games released each week probably exceeds 1000 (without exaggeration). there'd be no realistic way of compiling all that, so i think it's better to be selective and choose ~10 or so of the most interesting ones

I'd really like to see a weekly round-up of some of the more interesting games currently in development, perhaps with a focus on games that have made a Feedback/DevLog topic in the forums here.

The reason I originally started reading indie gaming blogs was to be fed with a steady diet of links, so yes, do it.

Sounds good to me. I'll be interested to see what missed games get covered.

I think this would be a great idea for material for the front page. I assume there are many people who read the front page who are not members of the forum (or check out feedback/devlogs) and it would be cool to show off some of what the members here are creating.

i find devlogs boring, and i believe that most non-developing tigs readers don't like to read them either. but i'm subscribed to the feedback board, i try most pc games posted there, i've already showed paul three recent threads from there (dunno if they'll end up in the first eres report)

I think you could ignore compo and jam games:
- they're generally already featured in other frontpage aticles about the compo
-they're annoying and most of the time it's just a lot of unfinished games trying to be smart with a gimmick
-Indie devs who work hard on their game are generally ignored in favor or said novelties .

There's a lot of overlap between the Devlog and Feedback boards though.

Can't say I agree with that. Sometimes jams and compos are mentioned, although more on IndieGames then here and there are always a fair number of games that aren't especially polished but there's usually a rough gem or two per compo that's worth trying out.

yeah, there are a few compo games that feel like 'real games' occasionally, like chevyray's beacon for the ludum dare, or garden gnome carnage for the yoyo games winter competition.

but i think he meant that most compo games and short gimmick games in general usually aren't interesting to anybody but game developers, which is mostly true.

in any case we're all talking about different things, comps were mentioned because someone said that it'd be hard to cover all games when comps happen, but really it's hard to cover all games anyway just due to how many there are (hundreds or thousands of new ones every month) so comps don't actually significantly increase that number since most comps have a few dozen or at most a few hundred games made for them

I was disagreeing with the part about ignoring them altogether. I do agree that many are short and gimmicky to an extent.

http://www.tigsource.com/2010/09/06/the-weekly-report-1/

first one is up, let me know how you guys like it

i think this is a great idea... maybe take a leaf out of diygamer.com's book.. they cover heaps of new indie games, and very professionally.. they also cover a wider variety of games than tigsource seems to.
you're right - and i honestly think tigsource deserves the criticism it's been getting of late..the front page has definitely fallen in quality over the past 9 months...it's only really this forum that keeps things together. i mean, seriously - compare the wealth of content covered on diygamer to the content covered here.. you guys really need to play catch up!!
also notice there's no contact e-mails for tigsource editors on the front page, or the about page. how do you think indie developers are going to inform you about their games?

i agree, but also tigsource has always been slightly more selective than those other blogs, even in the old days (whether that's good or bad is arguable though). and it's always been more of a 'we'll find you, you don't find us' thing regarding which games get covered, so i imagine the lack of a contact page has something to do with that tradition.

nonetheless, i'm happy that i at least covered a few games that timw didn't :) -- shoot 3 for instance (the #1 game for this week) wasn't covered by him yet

Perhaps it's because I'm a visual person, but I'd like it better if the screenshots were much larger, hopefully the width of the text (and possibly cropped on the top and bottom so they don't take up that much space). Right now those screenshots don't amount to much.

Other than that, this seems good. Good job!

I concur! Larger screenshots for certain.

most often it looks more like a "these are our games, and our friends games" from the outside.. it does look quite self serving.
i definitely don't think it's selective by quality, because i've seen some right shite posted on the front page, when high quality games have seemingly been ignored.

i think this will definitely be a step in the right direction.

you really do need a couple of contact e-mails on the front page / about page tho..

if he provided a contact e-mail for input on games to feature, he would be flooded with mass amounts of requests for games to be included. the old "we'll find you" way is for the best really. He'll always have games to feature, there are no shortages of them.

I didn't mean for this feature in particular, I meant for the site in general.

IGN have contact e-mails.. even gamespot.. eurogamer.. kotaku.. giantbomb.. 1up.. indie games blog... they're all sites with higher traffic, and they see it to be fine - contact e-mails (or form, in some cases) readily available.. diygamer have all their contacts up front, and they're doing a far better job than tigsource - so I think it can't be entirely negative!
indiedb even lets users directly post their own news (has to be auth'd), and that's hardly spammed.

it's strange paul says that tigsource has been more selective..because the tagline (on the front page) says "unfiltered".. how can it be both?

it's a misnomer. there's no such thing as unfiltered news. it's not like any of the editors were sworn to abide by that silly tagline.

I don't see any reason why you would need to directly contact any of the editors. You can PM them on the forums, find some in IRC, or off their personal websites. If you really wanted to talk to them, you'd take that extra two seconds.

TigSource is more of a community than a news site nowadays. I know it says otherwise, but that's what it evolved to.

This. This a million times. Having full-size images would be really nice.

sure.
hey, i only criticize in the hope they'll improve :) i'd rather point out weaknesses than defend them.

shame it's evolved in to that, because it's nowhere near as good as it used to be.

+1 to height-cropped full-width screenshots

would be nice to have two shots of each game.. i don't know why, but i can't get a good idea of what i'm seeing with just one screenshot.

the about page actually used to have contact emails, but it got wiped when the forum software switched from typo to wordpress, and derek hasn't put the emails back yet (whether intentionally or not i dunno)

also, side note, but it's arguable whether indiegames.com or tigsource.com is the 'bigger site' (someone mentioned indiegames.com being a bigger site) -- we at least get more comments here, and have a higher alexa rating (which is loosely correlated with traffic).

the styles of the blogs have always been different though: tigsource tends to have fewer but longer posts that focus on more polished games, timw tends to write about more games and write about them more objectively.

i agree that there's a lot of in-group benefits to being friends or talking with an editor though -- for instance, i probably wouldn't have posted about allen's game about sisyphus if i didn't hear about it from him in irc. more importantly, about 6-8 of the games posted of the 11 games i just posted were made by people with forum accounts on this forum and forum threads here about their game (although the forum has a *lot* of members and most prominent indie developers have accounts here).

i don't think it's intentional favoritism so much as it is indirect and systematic and (to a degree) unavoidable, a consequence of how communication networks / social nets work. it's something to be aware of and work against, but i don't think merely having a list of contact emails is going to solve it or even necessarily help at all. better is to more actively work against it: when looking for games to post i made a point to visit other forums besides this one in search of games (for instance, shoot 3 was only posted on on the game maker forums).

but even then, of all the topics in the gmc, which one did my eyes drift towards? not to unknowns, but to those of developers i had heard of before, such as erik leppen. part of that is because people who made good games in the past will continue to make good games in the future, but part of that is bias. still, there were plenty of unknown developers in the list of 10 games too (people i had never heard of before, at least).

so basically what i'm saying is that i recognize it as a fundamental problem that indie game devs have trouble getting attention for their games. there are a lot of people who make indie games now and still relatively few people who play indie games. and there's a bit of a wall between the vast majority of indie developers whose games are only ever seen or played by a few hundred people (and for some, even reaching 100 downloads is an achievement!) and the top few percent who attract thousands or tens of thousands of players to each of their games no matter how bad (or good) their latest game is.

now the tendency of the developers who are in that top percent is to think that they're there solely because they deserve it, that good things rise and bad things fall, and that every game has exactly as many people interested in it as the game deserves. matthew wegner once explicitly told me that in irc (and that it's even true of trailers and hype), and others also hold this belief. but it's not something i really think is true, i do think it's largely luck with early games leading to name recognition which sort of has a snowball effect: as with a snowball, momentum is hard to start, but once it's a certain size and speed the snowball has it made (relatively -- it's never easy to attract people to your game, but it's *a lot* easier with name recognition).

so ya, part of my goal in this weekly report idea is to help give some of that momentum to unknowns, by posting more games, to get their snowballs rolling so to speak. so when the next time someone sees a game by 'shushgame' or 'RedProdukt' or 'DavidN' they'd be just as likely to try it out as if it were by 'cactus' or 'pixel' or 'nifflas'

oh, and about screenshots, i'm still skeptical that it'd look as good with full screens, but i'll consider it, particularly if ortoslon volunteers to make all the screenshots for the next week's article

it sounds to me like this is all a step in the right direction.

i'm not alone in my criticisms (although it may often seem that way, with the large number of people who come to 'blindly defend' - i understand their loyalty, and it's lovely - but criticism is only to help improve..defending just lets people get complacent..).. i was speaking to a couple of German developers on skype who also agree that diygamer is really setting the bar high, and you guys are yet to catch up.. you get more traffic than they do, but you don't do as thorough a job..

but you seem to be fairly aware of the weaknesses on this site.. and within the "scene" in general.. and i think as long as you're actively fighting those weaknesses, and doing a good job to showcase/review/write about/etc.. a wide range of varied games things will improve massively, i'm sure.

To pare down Paul's post (because he is excessively verbose):

We favor the people we know - and have history with - more than the people we don't. This is true of most people. Thus, TIGsource tends to cover games by more well-known developers as well as forum members.

Regarding the site in general, I think that it really began to suffer when Spelunky took off, mostly because of Derek's busy schedule. Where there was usually one post a day about games, now it's a far more conservative posting schedule. New blood (and perhaps even a new Editor-in-chief) would probably help with this, but TIGS is notoriously picky. Also, can't pay.

Edit: Not to say bad about the site. TIGS has been my home for the past 2 and a half years <3

To pare down DragonMaw's post (because he is excessively verbose):
It's a maffia.

Most of the games DIYgamer covers don't really interest me.  :shrug2:

To pare down moi's post (because he is excessively verbose):

farts

they're not quite as niche, it seems... so that'll happen :)