05-26-2012, 03:29 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-26-2012, 03:29 AM by Jacob__mybb_import1.)
(Warning: long, unorganized wall of text incoming)
Over 2 years ago, when the extremely buggy prototype to Buildism was being created, I did some research on sandbox game communities. I came to the conclusion that a sandbox game was the hardest kind of game to create, since sandbox games are heavily dependent on the community to create content. So to make a successful sandbox game, you either need to spend a lot of money on advertising, or just hope you get lucky.
And we did get lucky, with the Roblox raids. But we also got unlucky, because the game editor was nowhere near finished, and losing lots of work in a crash isn't a good first impression for a new user. I also made the mistake of getting Roblox to add Buildism to the filter so the DDOS attacks would stop, without thinking of how much that would hurt the community's growth in the future, and then there was the whole situation with CoderRyne, Ashely, mods going on strike, and me not being able to update the game due to college that caused a lot of people to leave.
I'll just go ahead and say that I'm not planning to make another major update. $1 a day from the ads isn't enough to justify the hours of code-wrangling that it would take to code the easy-to-use editor update, and the game I'm working on now has a lot more potential than Buildism.
So, if you want to see a change in the community, you have more power than I do.
One good thing about Buildism is that we're, for the most part, a community of like-minded people. Buildism is you, not just a Java game-creation program that doesn't work on Macs. I enjoy running successful communities as much as making games, so I could do just about anything that you guys wanted, even if it's getting rid of the 24/7 multiplayer and putting up a 20-slot Minecraft server. "Sodaplay" had an amazing community for many years, not because of the Java game that was abandoned by the developers, but because we were people who liked each other and got along well. I think the same thing might work for Buildism.
Over 2 years ago, when the extremely buggy prototype to Buildism was being created, I did some research on sandbox game communities. I came to the conclusion that a sandbox game was the hardest kind of game to create, since sandbox games are heavily dependent on the community to create content. So to make a successful sandbox game, you either need to spend a lot of money on advertising, or just hope you get lucky.
And we did get lucky, with the Roblox raids. But we also got unlucky, because the game editor was nowhere near finished, and losing lots of work in a crash isn't a good first impression for a new user. I also made the mistake of getting Roblox to add Buildism to the filter so the DDOS attacks would stop, without thinking of how much that would hurt the community's growth in the future, and then there was the whole situation with CoderRyne, Ashely, mods going on strike, and me not being able to update the game due to college that caused a lot of people to leave.
I'll just go ahead and say that I'm not planning to make another major update. $1 a day from the ads isn't enough to justify the hours of code-wrangling that it would take to code the easy-to-use editor update, and the game I'm working on now has a lot more potential than Buildism.
So, if you want to see a change in the community, you have more power than I do.
One good thing about Buildism is that we're, for the most part, a community of like-minded people. Buildism is you, not just a Java game-creation program that doesn't work on Macs. I enjoy running successful communities as much as making games, so I could do just about anything that you guys wanted, even if it's getting rid of the 24/7 multiplayer and putting up a 20-slot Minecraft server. "Sodaplay" had an amazing community for many years, not because of the Java game that was abandoned by the developers, but because we were people who liked each other and got along well. I think the same thing might work for Buildism.