Hello everyone.
Its been a while hasn't it? The site's administration has been gracious enough to let me back on the forums, and I'd like to take a moment to comment on this whole revamping ZFGC fiasco.
First off, where I've been since I've been banned. I've spent a bulk of my college career now banned from ZFGC, and when it comes to the internet, I've shifted gears towards working on my own site (Many of you know it; Its GDU) and working on my game (For anyone who remembers Pwn Squad, I'm making a sidescrolling beat em up using those characters and its art style) I also have been studying Marketing at (What's somehow) a pretty damn prestigious business program, so hopefully I can give you all some insight that you haven't thought of previously, even if a lot of its already been said in here . I'm going to take this post by post and give my thoughts; its the best way I can think of approaching this topic when I'm coming into it so late.
why dont we revamp the site in a whole new way and if the community could bring in some money (maybe advirtising)
The first thing you all have to realize is that to make money you have to spend money. Advertising is an effective marketing tool when you have a product or brand image you want to expand, but ZFGC isn't anything like that. First off, you have to identify your goals for the forum, find your mission statement. What is it that ZFGC does? ZFGC is a place to help others develop Zelda fan games. How do you help somebody do something like that? You share resources, code, and so on to aid in development, along with providing a friendly community that will help new users when they get stuck. Does ZFGC fit those needs? Sorta. You have a dedicated resource section, but its clunky and hard to navigate. You have resources that don't pertain to Zelda which adds clutter. Your tutorial section has absolutely no tutorials even pertaining to Zelda, but rather how to skin Linux and how to encrypt pornography. The community is there but its pretty tight-knit and nobody new is coming in. Long story short, ZFGC is failing to live up to its own mission statement. Either that or the mission statement isn't clear enough. Either way its a recipe for disaster. But back to advertising. How do you monetarily gain from a place that has no growth in the indie game marketplace? You can't expect advertisers to pay off much of anything when you have a group of 10 to 20 unique active users, because there's no way they'll be able to sell enough product to cover costs associated with advertising. And if you want to promote the forums on other forums, what's your hook? Hi, we're ZFGC, and we don't know what our mission statement is? You have to have a clear plan for ANY organization to succeed, whether its a business or a non-profit organization like this. And spending $500 to grab ZFGC.net won't help the site grow, there's no reason to try to diversify the site's portfolio when its this small. Everyone can use the .com address and it'd be fine, no reason to grab .net and have it redirect back here. The other thing is that people aren't randomly typing any URL into their address bar. Its a waste of money to buy multiple domain names for this site, simple as that.
(although a upgrade to SMF 2.0 might be nice)
In my opinion, ZFGC does need real forum software. SMF is abandonware (last I heard) and 2.0 never quite got all its security vulnerabilities patched up, not to mention all the incompatibilities with mods and whatever else that will break the site. But then you have to consider that running on SMF1 is like having a ticking time bomb. Eventually a HUGE exploit could surface that could leave the site in shambles, possibly even everything else hosted on the server (Since ZFGC doesn't have a dedicated box)
I suggest the community pooling together some money so that Vash or somebody can purchase an Invision Power Board (Throwback to 2004 right!
) or vBulletin license, or something similar. Those products have great support, are stable, and are overall the best software packages on the internet in my opinion. I run IPB 3.1.4 on GDU and besides a few quirks its pretty awesome. SMF could've been a better software package but its kind of fallen behind the curve.
I'd still like to see a merge with GDU, which I think would be nice, no matter who's running it. >_>
I'm gonna make this clear right here for everyone, I don't think a merge with GDU is a good idea. Horizontal mergers with message boards typically run into huge growing pains. I've witnessed three horizontal message board mergers, GameFAQs and GameSpot, GA and DSR, GDU and The World BBS. GameFAQs users picked on GameSpot users, calling them Spotheads, and the Gamespot users felt a false sense of superiority over the GameFAQs users because they could post images on their boards even though they couldn't spell. The features never really came together fully, and to this day its still a bit of a mess, although the userbase has finally settled down. GA and DSR we all remember what happened there. DSR users picked on GA users for no real reason, and GA users just wanted to have ZFGC back since GA had been an abysmal failure at achieving its goals. (There's that mission statement stuff again. Stick to your guns!) GDU and The World BBS mostly went ok, but thats because at the time GDU didn't have a userbase to speak of. It was almost more like taking BBS' community and introducing them to a more general concept, like pulling GA from ZFGC and getting a few new users in the process. The hiccup we had there was demographics; a lot of the younger users didn't understand that the forums weren't soley dedicated to Hawthorneluke's game anymore, and it took a few months before we stopped getting posts in the wrong forums about The World.
I don't feel that a horizontal merge does anything beneficial for either of us. GDU would get a few extra users, ZFGC would get some extra features and a slight speed increase on the site's load time. Nothing substantial on either end. And if anything, ZFGC has a lot to lose by merging with GDU since you lose all the history, short of me merging the database with GDU's. (Too much of a hassle, not worth it at all)
That's not to say that I'm against ZFGCers coming over to GDU and helping build the community there. I am all for it. ZFGC gave me a gift a long time ago--the ability to create indie games. I skipped the Zelda fan game stage and went straight towards making my own stuff, but I used the resources available on the site to do it and did it with the community's support. ZFGC was a perfect storm that nurtured creativity, but once TRM proved to not be skilled enough to finish OoT2D, everyone's drive fizzled out and people started leaving, and you all know the rest of the story. What I want to do with GDU is give something back to the indie community, so that other people can learn our craft. The first step is to provide resources for indie developers to learn how to get into game design, the next step is to build a community that's supportive and will help people learn, and then the last step is to put up resources that will help established developers sharpen their skills and learn to do things they didn't know how to before. My first step for GDU is to fill a niche that the death of ZiggyWare left behind for those of you familiar with the XNA community. I want to rehost as many of those old tutorials as possible on GDU, then have a system in place where people can submit new content and just have a constantly growing XNA/C# resource geared towards getting people's games onto the XBOX Live Indie Game marketplace. Once I have the infastructure in place (Which I'm working on now) I'm going to email the tutorial authors asking for permission to rehost their stuff and for copies of their code samples if they could provide them for me. Once we have a bunch of tutorials on GDU, I'll try to get the word out the best I can through official channels and then we'll have helped strengthen the indie community as a whole. (Not to mention Microsoft's product...
) Eventually I'd like to put up information on how to get people's games onto other marketplaces like PSN, WiiWare, and Steam. So its like a website sort of like GameDev, only with less of a focus on professional development and more of a focus on indie development. It retains ZFGC's original spirit, and its something I really want to give back to the community.
If anyone's interested in helping me with this, sign up for GDU's forums at
http://forum.gd-u.com . I'll send out a mass-email to everyone who's signed up once I'm ready to start contacting ZiggyWare tutorial authors, and hopefully together we can get it done very quickly!
Indeed.. I think we'll always be a Zelda forum in spirit, since that seems to be the one single, unifying interest that all members of this board share, to some degree. We'll also need to retain the (Fan)Game-development aspect, otherwise we would just become another Zelda forum and new members would be even less interested.
Its my opinion that the only real unifying interest this forum has is video games and to a smaller degree game development. There are lots of people here who don't know how to develop games but would love to play other people's original games, and that's an important demographic to consider when you have a forum like this. Its why I named GDU the way I did, Gamers & Developers. The emphasis is on both of them because you need both, even on a development forum. If we did banking software it'd be Bankers & Developers
How about starting to report on News across the gaming community
Mission statement. You have to either pick, do I want to make a new site, or do I want to focus on Zelda Fan Games. There's no reason you all can't keep the community and do both though, its not like you have to limit yourself to one website.
It also appears to me that our forum is greatly overstaffed. 50% of the active members are Mods or Admins.
Yup. There's no point in having everyone who's active a moderator. An admin's duty imo is to upkeep the site and add new features to it, and a mod's duty is to police the boards so that it stays within legal boundaries. Admins grow the market, mods prevent lawsuits. Without those needs there wouldn't be any reason to have them.
In the past more it seemed like a system of local moderation allowed for development boards to be more easily represented by someone who knew what they were doing in them.
IMO, local moderators are only useful on boards where the knowledgebase is so spread out that you couldn't possibly expect somebody to fairly moderate everything.
Hate to say it, ZFGC is a one-trick-pony. We've all witnessed the community grow around a singular project twice over
I wouldn't even say that Shadowgazer grew the community
More like a boost if anything lol
As bad as it may sound; fangaming is more of an introductory/hobby thing... Most people who started developing here have moved on to their own IP's. It's a lot more satisfying to make something that's truly your own. It's because of this that I agree with Porkchop on just removing "Zelda" from the equation. Frankly, Zelda has kinda sucked for the past 10 years anyway.
I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree so much with this that it isn't even funny. Fangaming is intro to the hobby of making games. That's what you have to focus on if you do a new site, sans Zelda. You have to keep the end marker clear or else you'll never get to it.
Making ZFGC active isn't something we can just "do." We're going to have to do something very big that will attract a lot of attention, and until someone can pick up the torch and do it, we won't get very many new members or get a lot of exposure. I think the community project is a great idea, but I do see a problem of the older members on this forum simply having moved onto other things. Most of the newer members, I think, do not have the talent or organizational skills in order to head up something that huge.
The only problem with community projects is that you can't organize a group of people that large and keep them task-focused. The fact that Sonic 2 HD is still being worked on is a miracle in that respect. But when you really look at Sonic 2 HD, its a group of four or five guys working on the thing with the community giving feedback, more than the decentralized community putting the game together themselves. Its more like a sponsored project than a community project. Something like that could be good for ZFGC but you'd have to have a group willing to do it.
I agree, which is why I suggest we widen our scope by changing our name to something along the lines of Nintendo Fan Game Central. We'd be including all Nintendo IPs: Pokemon, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kirby Donkey Kong, the whole package. The combined fanbase for all those games (and fan games) adds up to a lot more than just the limited Zelda games that we've set for ourselves.
The overhead for a NFGC is also massive. You can't do any one thing well so you don't really do anything at all. Its better to stay focused and start small than it is to try to broaden yourself like that. Jump to a different market if you can't survive in the fangame market, ya dig?
Our biggest market in terms of a potential userbase are those who use Game Maker and those who like Nintendo games.
Not as large as indie developers with all sorts of tools. You can teach somebody to program and sponsor a tool like GameMaker or XNA, but you're still teaching them Computer Science principles, and that needs to be the focus. If that makes sense.
I was going to say a whole bunch of crap but then I just decided to say that I think ZFGC is fine as is and I've started up my game again and I plan to contribute a ton of the GML code and ALL the graphics for anyone to use.
ZFGC needs a lot more people like you onboard. Props dude. Keep on keepin' on.
And finally, I was talking to MG earlier, and ZFGC has a few avenues it could take. It could stay like it is but get focused and improve the resource section, becoming the premier place on the internet to make Zelda fan games but have no community growth. It could also do something similar to Sonic Retro:
http://www.sonicretro.org/And document information on every Zelda game, thorough information on Zelda prototypes, and host information on romhacks and fangames. Changing the market to more of a Zelda Fan Central than a Zelda Fan Game Central. You wouldn't have to change the name but you would have to change your mission statement to adapt. And finally you could create a new site with a different focus altogether and let the community move to it. You could even combine some of those, like keep ZFGC around as a Zelda resource AND create a new site, or keep ZFGC and help me build up GDU, or keep ZFGC and create a sister site ZFC, you get the idea.
I hope that this brings some fresh insight to the conversation, and if not, at least I got to listen to some good music while I typed this out
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Topic: Revamping ZFGC (Read 34567 times)