TL;DR New moderator, so please do report any problematic posts or comments. What sort of content would you like to see here? Post-mortems? AMAs? And a reminder that we allow self-promo here but only if it adds value from a gamedev perspective.

Hi all! You might have seen my name around in the community. I’ve been here since before the Reddit blackouts, which I guess makes me some kind of ancient lemming-witch, and spent the last few weeks trying to kick off discussion threads and shilling our community at every opportunity which is probably how some of you made your way here in the first place.

I’ve recently been appointed as community mod by an instance admin (thank you Ada <3), due to our lead (and only other) mod currently being inactive.

Firstly, please know this isn’t a grab for power, it just makes sense to have someone able to deal with reports and enforce the existing rules already put in place by our lead mod until they hopefully return. I’ll do my best to steer the ship until that happens, but would love to get your feedback on direction.

As we’re a relatively new community on a relatively new site, obviously we don’t have a huge amount of valuable content here. YET. I’ve been chatting to some friends on other platforms about potentially making long form, in-depth posts here about their experiences to serve as interesting, educational reads as well as pillar content for the community.

Gamers with specific accessibility requirements, senior AAA developers, solo indie devs who have successfully acquired project funding or navigated their way through Next Fest, employers who can talk about how to get hired, that sort of thing.

We could potentially even go in the direction of AMA style threads rather than essays and make an event out of it, if that’s something the community would be more interested in?

Any suggestions for the sort of thing you’d like to see are very welcome, and I’ll do what I can to make it happen! Personally I’m coming at the gamedev topic from the perspective of a hobbyist solo developer, but I know we have a diverse group here who will most likely want to see different things, so this is your chance to be heard.

Lastly I just wanted to touch on the existing rule around self-promo, as I know many people are using mobile apps that don’t show the sidebar info and may be unaware.

Self-promotion is WELCOME in this community. But with a caveat: it must come with added value for our members. I’ll quote the sidebar here, written by our glorious leader:

Self-promotion is fine as long as you do it from a gamedev perspective - share your progress, insights, techniques and mishaps! If you recently posted, update the previous post instead of filling the frontpage with your project

So you want to drop a link to your devlog? Sure! Do it as part of a post discussing the stuff you learned recently during the development process and how we can avoid making the same mistakes you did.

Looking for trailer feedback? Sure! Tell us all about the research you’ve done so far and how you used what you learned to structure what you’re showing us. What do you think worked and what didn’t?

Want an excuse to give us your Steam wishlist link? Sure! But do it as part of a post-mortem post of some kind, a brief guide on how you approached making an unusual mechanic, or even a meta-discussion on what you’ve learned about encouraging more wishlists…

…you get the idea.

If promo posts start to significantly overshadow more discussion-focused posts we may eventually revisit this rule, but as a probably temporary guardian of the space it would be weird of me to come in and immediately make changes like that, so here we are.

Thanks for reading my wall of text and I hope you all have a great day!

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I will never understand the aversion to allowing Indie devs to post their work. It’s hard enough as it is to get noticed. Adding all sorts of strings to what is already a small pool of available spaces to share your work just makes people not want to participate at all. Besides, given how small the lemmy community is here, I don’t see the harm in allowing self promotion regardless of how its done.

    • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOPM
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      1 year ago

      Hi! Thanks for the reply.

      I actually agree with you, for the most part. It is good to have a place for indies to promote their work, although I think the spirit of the rule was to prevent this place from turning into “drop a link and run with no discussion” as the primary sort of content as that just results in a list of links with nobody interacting with anyone else. We all know other game devs aren’t the best people to market to, but I think a lot of it is less “marketing” and more just wanting to show work to people who will understand what it took to make, which I can definitely get behind!

      One thing I’ve been mulling over is whether it’s worth having a weekly thread for those types of posts, sort of a “what are you working on” / “share your wins this week” type of thing. That way, general progress updates, fun screenies and anything you want to drop a link to without any further interaction can go in there while any shares that are more of a discussion style could still be posted as their own thing.

      Since I’d had no feedback on any of this until your comment, plans are very much in the “throw everything at an ideas shortlist and see what sticks” stage. One of those ideas was to try and kick off such a thread today (WIP Wednesday seems like as good a time as any to kick off a “what are you working on” thread, haha), so we’ll see if that gets any bites.

      Any thoughts on this as a compromise?

      Again I am not looking to go all power mad or anything so was wary of changing rules set down by the original community owner, but if people feel strongly about wanting this to be a free-for-all self-promo space then I am totally open to that discussion 🙂

    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      1 year ago

      I think the aversion is largely due to general weariness with advertising of all sorts, and rules lawyers who will tie themselves into knots in order to claim they didn’t transgress whatever specific rule defines forbidden advertising in a given venue. People tend to develop knee-jerk reactions when self-promotion is mentioned.

      In my experience, small, actively-moderated venues like this one can safely leave it to staff to judge what kinds of promotion are or are not allowed. If this place ever reaches hundreds of posts a day, the rules may need to be reconsidered, but I think permitting self-promotion is fine for now.

      • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOPM
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        1 year ago

        Hi! To be honest I thought they’d ironed this bug out of Lemmy now but clearly not.

        There’s actually no process for “approving” members to a community. Once you click subscribe, you’re in. But there’s historically been a bug where sometimes you’ll see the subscribe button turn to this pending status. What actually happens is that you are subscribed, and posts should show in your subscription feed as expected, but the button just doesn’t reflect your actual status. So tl;dr don’t worry about it.

        I know a few weeks ago it was primarily affecting communities hosted on .ml due to their performance issues during the big migration. But I guess it’s still happening from time to time.

        Sorry about that, but officially welcome in 😄

        • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Ahhh thanks for the extra info. That is good to know. It will be fixed in time I’m sure. There would be so so so much to work on, priorities must be made

          • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOPM
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            1 year ago

            Absolutely, do not envy the devs at all, they have so much to work on and so many demands pulling them in all directions. I think most issues are being fixed incrementally though, for example the federation issues and this pending subscription bug both got considerably better in 0.18.1, so there are clearly still situations where we’re having problems but day by day it’s getting better.

            Best we users can do for now (assuming we’re not able to contribute code of course) is be patient, and help each other out with explanation and workarounds.

            Anyway! Since you’ve joined a gamedev community I’ll assume you’re either making something cool of your own, planning to, or are employed making something cool for someone else. So feel free to catch us up on what you’ve been up to this week in the “wins” thread which I am legally obliged to link here in an effort to not be the only one who replied to it 😅

            • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Ex AAA animator here. Burnt out. Did other things (Still do). Gamedev in my very, very small spare time. But, it’ll be a while to I can commit to a game again. LOVE game dev, just not at the point in my life I can commit. Looking forward to that time to come again though. Godot all the way for me also btw.

              • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOPM
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                1 year ago

                Alas I think we all know that feeling! Sometimes there is just not enough time in the day (or week, or month, or year!)