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[tejon]

Hey folks! There's a chance that some here will recognize me from the Elder Scrolls mod scene, or my meager Twitter and reddit presence. I've yet to release anything significant despite trying more than once, and that's made me far more shy than I should probably be. Upside, I've got a killer team for Bacon Game Jam and I'm starting #1GAM, so hopefully I'll stick my head out more often. I really miss the community involvement I had back when I was modding Oblivion. And in fact, getting back to that is what drives this post.

I've been working with Slant.co for the last couple of months. Slant is a collaborative review site where users describe what they're looking for, and the community suggests options with pros and cons backed up by sources. A little while back they put an ad up on reddit looking for someone to help them research topics of interest to beginner game devs. This seemed like a great excuse to make myself look into a bunch of things that I should have done years ago, so I bit. (Yes, that means they're paying me.) But soon enough I started getting excited about the site itself; it's got a real mission, and the team behind it is great. To the point, the sort of folks I don't mind endorsing from a personal account!

Okay, enough introduction. Slant has some solid general-programming coverage (shill mode engage: here,are,some,examples) and wants to be more specifically useful for game dev, but there's a challenge in achieving that goal: working from a crowdsourced model requires a crowd. At the very least, we need a critical mass of active contributors in the field. I've been running a series on reddit addressing various topics (links at the bottom), and the content has been received quite well, but reddit is reddit... hard to get more than passing engagement.

I want to see this become a real asset to the community, but it's not a one-man job. So if anyone here has some time to kill, please check out the site! (Here's only stuff tagged Game Dev.) I believe Slant will be a fantastic resource with enough people contributing. Our essential ingredients are good questions, good options with relevant pros and cons, and (secondarily) enough votes to get meaningful rankings.

If you don't like the site or don't see it being useful, feedback on why is equally welcome -- they're actively working on both UI and back-end improvements, and critique actually gets attention.


Episodes of my reddit weekly, I Wanna Be the Dev:

• Funding Options
• Distribution Services
• Building Indie Hype
• Acquiring Assets
• Social Media and Press Interaction
• Game Jams
• Game Engines for Non-Coders
• Learning to Code
• Pixel Editors

Topic suggestions are welcome!

[loudo]

Seems great. The site is well done and neat.

[tjcbs]

Nice site, but there needs to be a better presentation of the information. As it stands, few will have the patience to sift through this long and ever-growing list of questions, most of which they probably don't care about.

At the *very* least, the search engine needs to be improved. As an example, I saw the question "What are the best 3d riggers?". So I tried searching for "rigging", and that question didn't come up. A question containing "rigging" did, followed by a list of completely irrelevant questions.

[skearney]

Slant founder here.

Thanks for taking the time to look around our site tjcbs, I sincerely appreciate it. We outsourced our search (Algolia) as we're a tiny team and search is pretty tricky to get right. Obviously it needs a lot of improving, I'll see if there is a way to tweak it to get proper results in for those queries.

Assuming we had *perfect* search, can you think of any other ways to help you navigate around the site? Some ideas we have been thinking about:

• Change the feeds to a feed of recommendations (votes) not a random list of questions. You could then filter the list by higher karma users or ones you're following to keep up to date with the latest stuff
• Group related questions into guides, ie all the questions to do with programming 2d games with unity example:(http://gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanLeonski/20140930/226626/The_best_tools_for_your_Unity_2D_game.php)
• Have a better "top gamedev questions" system and notify users when a new, good question has been added.
  

Again, thx for your time mate!

Stuart

[tejon]

Reformatted the first post to list out my weekly reddit topics in full, and added this week's.

Loudo and tjcbs, thanks for being taking the time to really check it out!

[tjcbs]

Hi Stuart,

I had thought about that question before I posted, and honestly I didn't come up with anything. It is a difficult problem, isn't it! Those ideas are all pretty good, I'll let you know if I think of something else. Maybe focus on the tagging system, making sure that is top quality, perhaps involving user curation and points earned for improving the categorization. Not quite sure how that would work though

As far as the search engine goes, this is very not my area, but why don't you use google custom search? Is it a cost issue? Another thought, a dictionary *must* exist which maps words to their root word i.e. "rigging", "rigger" -> "rig", could you then feed that transformed content and searches to the search engine?

[skearney]

Thanks for thinking about it

The issue with Google custom search is that you get very little control over the UX. We want to do a search dropdown, or have different sections inside the search results for Questions, products & users etc and Google custom search won't let you do it.

You're spot on with the dictionary comment, I'm on it.

[tejon]

Last week Slant got a round of improvements, mostly in the form of a UI overhaul aimed at better conveying the core purpose of the site -- i.e., helping people make informed decisions. Option vote counts have been de-emphasized; pros and cons get a stronger presence in the option lists, and pro/con vote counts are more prominent. Whether or not you checked it out before these updates, please have a look and share any thoughts you have!

Also, updated the original post with the latest episodes in my reddit series.