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[PompiPompi]

How do you build a coomunity around your unfinished game?
I am always puzzled at how people are able to build communities so quickly(even very small ones) on unfinished games, where I wasn't able to build a community at any stage of my previous game.
I know some people say "If your game is good, they will come", but I am afraid it's not that simple.
My current game is called Wonder.
http://www.indiedb.com/games/wonder.

[Evan Balster]

I have a teeny little community right now, and I'm still a bit curious about this myself.  My ears are open to anyone wiser who responds.

My own experience has been getting a few people who were excited about my game, putting up a forum for them to give me bug reports and suggestions, and adding things there for ingame stuff.  My project is online, collaborative and community-based, though, so it comes a bit more naturally than it might with a single-player game.


--Oh!  Just saw that your game is online.  Well, now, that changes things!

First off, making sure your game has initial appeal to people is important: community members are 'recruited' from players, not the other way around.  Once you get loyal community members, they might bring in more people, but don't count on it.

Secondly, letting members of an early community in on the development process is both a great source of help and a wonderful way to get community members participating.  Make your forums focused around feedback and suggestions and respond promptly (and positively) to both.

Third, keep the information coming.  I'm not to this sort of stage yet, but it's easy to see in successful community managers like the Wolfire guys.  Regular updates and a sense of continuous, rapid progress on the project will help people to stomach early versions of your software and keep coming back for the new ones.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i'm not sure either, but having long-term fans helps a lot. for instance, there were a lot of people who loved immortal defense quite a bit and are looking forward to my next game; those people are my main playtesters. it's something you probably have to build up over time. your first game probably won't have a community. your 10th game might.

you can still do things to keep people engaged though, obviously. things like having a forum, a twitter, a changelog that you update daily or weekly, stuff like that. wolfire does a particularly good job at fostering a community, so you could learn from them.

that said i also do think your game looks very unpolished, which probably hurts any community you'd want to build around it. for instance, your tiles don't have transitions between them, it's just sand tile, water tile, very blocky. everything looks pretty bare. i know they're supposed to be user-edited, but attractive defaults couldn't hurt; if you can't do them, perhaps find an artist to help make the defaults

[PompiPompi]

Well, the tiles are intentionally flat and blocky. The resolution is actually 512x384, since each pixel is 2x2.
I do need to improve the tiles though, and I am working on it.
I am thinking of releasing alphas so players could already play the game in it's early stages.
Perhaps I should create a website with a forum for them to praticipate.
I am still not sure how it works out, but I guess it's giving stuff for the community to do, read and etc.

Edit: So since when you had those fans? Since before the game was out or after?

[AuthenticKaizen]

i haven't read this book but according to amazon reviews it might be good...
it's called "the art of community" and the author released the pdf version for free.

http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/2009/09/18/the-art-of-community-now-available-for-free-download/

[Nix]

i haven't read this book but according to amazon reviews it might be good...
it's called "the art of community" and the author released the pdf version for free.

http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/2009/09/18/the-art-of-community-now-available-for-free-download/

Wow, thanks for the good link.

[HDSanctum]

I played your alpha and can see it has potential.

Just one question, can you heal/revive yet?

A few years ago at the GMC, there was a game called "Knightmoon" (I think). It was a simple multiplayer game, very early on. Basically it was a chat program with nice graphics at that early stage. It generated a lot of buzz around it self and inspired confidence that it was going somewhere. Sadly the team stopped working on that game, but I think a few things can be learnt from it:

• The game was well polished at the early stage (good graphics, music and controls). It was already fun to play and it inspired confidence that it would get better, quickly.
• People were excited about it and you could really feel the game and community atmosphere, even though it was basically a walk around chat program. (it might have had battle with blobs, and maybe mining, but I am not sure how functional it all was).

I think it was smart of them to have waited to get the polish before they tried to build a community. Looking at your game, it is very unpolished at the moment. I understand that it's an early alpha and you weren't expecting it to be judged critically, but first impressions are everything in the sea of games that help form the internet. If you start building a community at this stage, you might find it difficult to keep the early testers. The early testers are the ones who will probably be the most loyal too, considering that they were willing to give your game attention while it was only a diamond in the rough. (all of this is pure conjecture, however).

Examples of things that could be polished:

• Placing resources in subdirectories so that Wonder.exe is easier to find.
• Having an in-game method of entering a username (never expect players to dig through config files, never trust that they won't).
• Having a better server to run the game on (I have to retry your game on a different connection, but my first attempt had very poor response. I am also from Australia, so maybe it's fine for other people).
• Improving graphics. I always think it's bad form to call it a "feature" to have the player build the game for you. You should definitely have better default graphics. [tangent] I am not targeting you specifically on this, but some people think that level editors can make a game (and sometimes they can, like Minecraft and Infinite Blank, but in those cases the level editor is the game and not incidental to the game).[/tangent]
• Get good music and sound in.

Of course, I can understand if you want to spend more time adding features to your game before you start spending time polishing, but at the same time those features probably won't seem that interesting unless they receive polish before letting people try it.

Considering that your goal is to create a sense of an 'open world', I think you should definitely demonstrate it better in your alpha and/or videos and descriptions. Creating games with an open world and sense of adventure is exactly the kind of games that I want to create, so I can appreciate your goal.

One way to achieve the feeling of open world is to introduce a better scale to your game. At the moment you can travel between castles in a few steps and can easily reach the borders of the world. Monsters, trees, castles, people and steps are the same size as each other.

If you want to keep the scale as it is, then you should explore other ways to convey the open world/exploration feel. Maybe by making it more difficult to avoid stronger monsters [than you], so you can't easily walk to the the edges of the world.


On another note, although having a forum/website of your own would be an improvement, you also have to figure out how to convince people to include your website/forum in their cycle of regular visits. It's actually very hard to do this. Luckily we have better tools at our disposal these days: Social networking and news feeds. Instead of convincing people to go out of their way to look at your community (often, only to be disappointed when they find there has been no progress/updates since their last visit), you can prompt them to go to your website when you actually have news. Adding yet another Twitter or RSS feed to their list will hardly bother anyone (unless you clutter their feeds with crap), so you might find it's a good way to start.

[PompiPompi]

Thank you all for the comments,

@HDSanctum,
When you kill all the monsters in a certain area, you get helaed.

I think you are right polish is important. I am polishing and adding features simultanously. Mostly polishing lately. Things like improving the tiles and improving the "user experience" and technical problems.
You also gave some practical points, and I think I could implement most of them fairly quickly.
And yea, a website is definitely on the to do list.

I am not sure I want to have an open world at this stage, as much as I want an explorable world rich with content. Kind of like an old single player RPG game with a big map and a lot of monsters and content.

Bottom line, I don't think I will hold back the alphas right now. I will work a lot on polishing though.

Thank you for your feedback. I will be glad to see you join the server in future alphas.

[Glass]

Well I've been giving this a lot of thought because for all those games that aren't released on XBLA and don't get a ton of natural coverage need to resort to grassroot initiatives to grow their communities. It is one of the hardest parts of developing a game and I have not figured out the proper mix of ingredients to make it work. This is what I've been doing to try and make this work:

1- Sharing everything and anything that comes out of our dev. Whether it be concept art, WIP screenshots/videos, design/technical articles and so on. I rather give away more than less at this stage in the game. There is no point keeping your stuff a secret if no one will see it anyway 

2- Be everywhere. I post content on twitter (as well as meet people, facebook, IndieDB, TIGSource, Modacity and any other place I can to get feedback and try and get some people interested. I've been getting decent comments on those websites but it hasn't translated to comments on my dev blog. If you guys have any ideas for this, let me know...

3- Local initiatives... I got connected with a few local groups and showed the game of there. They liked it a lot and gave us some playtest feedback. I figured if I was a local star first and people knew me, then I will only grow from their. Attending GDC and other larger events surely would help too. Possibly IGDA chapter meetings and such.

What do you guys think? I also wanted to know what you guys though about my first point of sharing all my content. The only thing I am keeping secret in my game in the ending, and figured all the rest is good to go. Do you guys feel the same way?

[BrianSlipBit]

Alex,

I thought your entire post was pretty much spot on.  Even the part about showing stuff early.  There really is nothing to lose, especially if you think people likely aren't going to see it anyway.

I think a slow and steady burn with those types of efforts across all fronts is what eventually leads to a small "following".  From there you can hope for some word of mouth, etc.

It's definitely not easy.

[PompiPompi]

Well, there is a difference between "showing stuff" and giving alphas. Alphas might break, alphas might dissappointed, and a dissappointed player might not get back to your game in a long time.

[Glass]

I agree with the alpha statement of "the game being dissapointing" but what about guys like Minecraft and Lugaru that have released pre alpha work and it's a huge success. I suppose it's always hit or miss. I am going to keep sharing content of the development as long as the storyline "punch" is not given away...

[BrianSlipBit]

When I say "show stuff", I mean media only (screenshots or videos).

[Glass]

Oh ok, I was talking about being 100% open about development. For example, writing about tools I use, interesting AI and background editors. I also talk about the design process of guns, environments, characters and so on. I listed out every gun that will be in the game. I figured the more the community feels involved in the dev, the more likely they will come back.

I found art doesn't create loyalty. People love our concepts but it's still not enough. These are just accounts of what happened in my situation. Sometimes a trailer and art works great but just not as I would of hoped in my experience.

[BrianSlipBit]

Alex,

My "show stuff" response was for PompiPompi asking about Alpha builds.  I still agree with pretty much everything you've suggested so far, including tools, editors, design docs, concept art, etc.

If you want to start talking Alpha builds, then I say it depends on what you consider "Alpha".

[WhiskyBiscuit]

I have yet to release my first game ( will be soon though ) but from my experience of being in communities normally they need something to do or discuss.  So a game with tactics, user generated content or secret features that need to be discovered normally seem to get me involved in communities. 

Also when I am interested in the vision of the games company of what they are trying to achieve I generally follow their progress and discuss it.

Just all sorts really, just be active and have lots of conversations with people currently in your community. 

[krasimir]

i haven't read this book but according to amazon reviews it might be good...
it's called "the art of community" and the author released the pdf version for free.

http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/2009/09/18/the-art-of-community-now-available-for-free-download/

Great! Got the book, now all that remains is reading past the first dozen pages or so.