At 9/14/12 09:40 AM, TomFulp wrote:
Hey sorry if you guys have already discussed this sort of thing...
I think about how the forum that would personally interest me would be discussion about straight up game development and design. It doesn't matter what programming language or platform, game design is game design. The closest thing to it is conversations that take place here in the Flash Reg Lounge.
So it makes me wonder, what if we closed down the Mobile forum (because it's a flop), changed the entire "Developers & Programmers" category into just "Programming", then added a "Game Design" or "Game Development" forum under "Artists & Creators", officially representing game makers among the Animation, Art and Music categories we have now.
It would feel a lot more like the old Flash forum was before Animation was split off, but more wide spread in terms of languages. It'd be great because personally I love seeing games as they get developed and the posts that people make would give us a glimpse into what they're working on.
We could also have AMAs with developers. I (hopefully we) would want to make an effort to pull in guys from the scene and get them to have AMAs, post-mortems, etc...
Also a brilliant idea. It'd be cool to have a AMA thread that gets stickied for a fortnight and then rolls onto the next one, although, with that frequency, we might run out of developers fairly fast.
:So that begs the question, is it better to do it on user pages where it gets all fragmented, or would it be best in a centralized forum where everyone shares the same interests? It could be a mix of both, like making a big post in the forum, then using the front page Artist News to give the public a brief synopsis and link to your post - thus promoting the forum and bringing in more activity to the benefit for everyone who hangs out there.
Having it on user pages would mean that people who are already fans of that developer would be able to read about them, but finding new developers just based on the AMA would be hard as there's no central location for it. I think having one big post would be too cumbersome to find a specific developers AMA.
The forum would only succeed if a good number of interesting game developers actually like hanging out there and talking. Do you guys think it has potential?
I'm not much of a developer but I'd visit it often.