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[Paul Eres]

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?

[Melly]

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.

[Paul Eres]

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

[MisterX]

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".

[Paul Eres]

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

[moi]

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?

[Paul Eres]

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).

[Dustin Smith]

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.

[Paul Eres]

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

[mirosurabu]

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! (:

[bento_smile]

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

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

[Accidental Rebel]

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?

[Paul Eres]

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

[alspal]

a screenshot and a sentence or two describing them.

Sounds perfect, I prefer that sort of thing.

[Accidental Rebel]

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

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.