MAX MCGEE'S PROFILE

author=Neok

author=Max McGee
This definitely falls into the umbrella of conventional wisdom. I think that almost everyone who's serious about making games has grokked this old saw by now.

Buddy, you'd be surprised how often I have to start a game, setup a hotkey script to continually press confirm for me, then wander off and come back 10 minutes later so that I can actually start playing.

No, I wouldn't. Seriously, whatever field of creative endeavor you look at, there is advice that is commonly agreed upon but not commonly followed.

Well I think there's a substantial zone of overlap between 'crap we all know is usually bad' and 'crap we all see all the time anyway'.

edit: why on earth do you need 3,328 icons anyway

my game has LOTS of skills, status effects, weapons, and armor. LOTS. obviously they won't all be used, but a LOT of them will. Obviously I don't know a priori which ones exactly I will or won't use, that won't be decided until the database (i.e. the game) is fully complete. But there is enough icon-needing content in the game that I want at least that large of a pool to choose from.

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author=Nirwanda
From the vx ace help file:
Note that the Compress Game Data command may fail with game projects exceeding approximately 2 GB.*
*This value is merely a guideline. It will vary depending on the PC hardware and OS you are using and the game you are creating.

wait a second...you, there, with the avatar. STOP, IMMEDIATELY. your username/avatar is Nirwanda, the "True Name" of the Jester Spirit from the SNES Shadowrun. IS THIS CORRECT??

lol

(I am just saying it is really bad timing for me; one of the risks of being awesome all the time is that occasionally someone will say "during the next three weeks you get prizes for being awesome!" and it makes me feel like I wasted my awesome by doing it at the wrong time.)

Oh, don't get me wrong. Scores, in general, bother me. Look at one of my own games and you have two people who thought it was stellar and amazing and one person who thought it was crap. The third person also thought that the critically acclaimed Grave Spirit and the wildly popular Legacies of Dondoran deserved 1.5 Star reviews, so clearly my vicious panning at least put me in august company.

The way that review averaging works means that because none of the scores are weighted, the game winds up with an aggregated score that is 'slightly above average'. I should be happy enough with this but...the truth is, two of the people who bothered to review the game thinking it was great and the other one person who bothered to review the game thinking it was crap doesn't mean the game is, in some objective sense, slightly above average. It doesn't mean anything except that two of the people who bothered to review the game thought it was great and the other one person who bothered to review the game thought it was crap. Basically, scores are nothing but a useful evaluative shorthand. They're not a "true measure of a game's worth" whatever that is. I don't think scores are problematic in and of themselves, I think it's the weight that other factors, like the site's structural interface/design and our own psychological design, give to these scores that creates a problem.

An interesting idea I just had is what if instead of using an average review score, when there was more than one starred review, the site staff picked one of the reviews to be the "featured review" for that game and used the star score of that one to display. This would obviously set one person's opinion above all others, and the staff would make a judgement call based on the quality of the review. I don't know, this obviously opens a whole can of worms on its own and I thought of about half a dozen problems with it just writing this paragraph, so I'm not actually advocating for it I'm just thinking out loud.

I don't think that getting rid of stars for everything entirely is feasible because honestly when you search the site for a game to play as a lot of our 'silent user majority' do, one of the parameters you want to be able to filter is 'overall goodness of game'. And let's say you arbitrarily set the minimum rating you were interested in to Four Stars (****), well even if you were looking for a science fiction RPG you'd automatically miss out on my game which one person thought was a 4.5 and another person thought was a 5 just because one other person thought it was a 1.5. So yeah the system as it exists is not awesome but abolishing stars entirely is not a practical solution because end-users wanting to search games by rating is a reasonable request. Hmm...

I think the idea of a game creator being able to opt out of displaying its score is fascinating...but I do worry about how the public would perceive games with 'hidden' scores, and this idea opens up its own whole host of issues.

But all that is a bigger and thornier issue than the question of whether or not to disable scores just for reviews of incomplete games specifically. I do have specific arguments I want to make here--namely an argument that unstarred reviews are "good enough" for end user evaluation of demos but not complete games--but it's going to have to wait until I am substantially less tired.