I am new on this forum.

I see that topics where people introduce their games (released or almost released) have no any feedback or comments.

Why is that so?

Am am sorry if I haven't post that in not proper place of forum

The Your Announcements forum tends to have far less discussion than other areas of the site.

The more technical forums generally are longer discussions with far more detail.

This is probably more suited for the GDNet Lounge or GDNet Comments forums, but a mod will simply move it if deemed necessary.

Personally I find those topics not so engaging, there's not much to discuss and usually comes down to people(including me) saying it looks nice/cool/awesome, but that's about it. There are also a lot of games out there, more than anyone can play in a lifetime, so people are very picky about the games they decide to play, which means not a lot of people will actually try those games and give feedback. I do check out most of the announcement posts, because I hope I can one day post in that section as well and I would appreciate it if people at least had a look .

A list of things I think would increase the number of comments, in general:

• Show actual pictures in the post, not links, actual pictures you can see straight away. Don't think you can lure more people to your website by providing a link to screenshots, if you don't put in the effort to show me your game, I'll be less likely to check out your game.
• Gameplay is not visible through screenshots, so show me at least 1 video. Again, this needs to be accessible quickly, I personally prefer embedded, but a link would do as well.
• Engage! No one is interested in an info dump. Ask for feedback, start a discussion, don't be too general. You'll have a much higher response rate if you ask people to rate UI x vs y rather than asking what they think of the UI.
• Respect people's time. This is in line with everything above, make it easy for people to check your game out, give you the feedback that you need without having to invest a ton of time.

That's my take on it.

Yup, moved to the lounge.

TIGSource is the best forum for getting feedback on your game(s), imo.

Gamedev is the best for technical stuff.

It's partly psychological to me. I've seen multiple of those threads, and often times I don't know what to say, other than, "That looks nice." or "Congrats".

Saying, "I made X!" is a statement, not a question or beginning of a conversation. There's nowhere for the topic to go from there except praise or criticism. And it seems rude to criticize, and after saying "That looks nice" a dozen times, it seems trite. And many times it doesn't look nice, but it still good that the person achieved that much.

I could forcibly start an artificial conversation I don't actually care about, to feign interest ("Oh, what'd language did you use?", "Are you enjoying it?", "Is this your first game?", etc...), but that usually peters out in a post or two, and if the OP wants a conversation, its really up to him to provide the topic of conversation, not me.

Basically, these threads are just requests-for-attention-and-praise. Which is not bad! We all want praise for our creations and recognition for our accomplishments, and this motivates us to press onward!
But conversations that are one-sided 'praise me' discussions are boring enough in real life (unless you're the person being praised), and even more boring online.

I really do (consciously) make an attempt to be engaged and focused (and maintain eye contact and respond with questions and comments) when someone in real life is telling me about something that interests them, but not because I care about what they made but because I care about the person. (And it's frustrating when I go start a discussion about something that interests me or that I accomplished, and then they turn the conversation back onto themselves. That's bad form, mate).

But on the internet, it's even more difficult, because I don't know this person, and there's no real-time chatting occurring - it's easier in the chatroom to say "congrats" and get back to what I'm doing, then to commit myself to maintain my non-interested engagement for several days of back and forth posting on a forum thread.

[Warning: From here on I'm going to be saying "you", but I don't mean you personally]

On top of this, even when I make attempts to engage with someone in an announcement post, they often make it harder de-humanizing themselves by pretending they are a large studio:

(if I'm going to encourage someone, I want to encourage a human not a corporation)

"we are doing X" - uh, you're one guy, not a 'we'.

"as the president/CEO/team-leader of BlahBlah Games Power Corporation, I'd like to say..." - Being small-time and personal is a key advantage of indies. Don't throw away one of your very few advantages, by pretending to be bigger than you're not.

And further, they then de-humanize us, making it still harder to stay engaged:

(conversations are give-and-take, and if you treat us as a commodity, you become all-take and no give)

"big announcement: we just recruited a new artist!" - We're not your blog, we're not your fans, we are your peers. If you want a pat on the back, that's fine! But don't pretend that we're tabloid readers sucking up every last drop of celebrity gossip about your team's development drama.

"next week we'll release more screenshots" - You're not exactly working on the next Halo game. We don't care enough to anticipate the release of your screenshots, so either release them now or don't bother mentioning it until you do release them.

And on top of that, they don't even know what they want from us:

"we were just featured on Bob's Generic Let's Play!" - You have it in reverse here, the Let's Plays are supposed to direct the YouTube viewers to your game. Your announcement post isn't supposed to direct peers to someone else's Let's Play channel.


We're your peers. This is a development forum.

If you want feedback:
- Post a topic in the appropriate game design, programming, writing, or visual arts forum, about the specific thing you want feedback on. Not your game as a whole.

If you want general discussion:
- Post a topic in the appropriate game design, programming, writing, or visual arts forum, about what specific topic you wish to discuss. Not your game as a whole. Bonus points if you don't even mention your game's name ("I'm trying to do X, but am having trouble with Y..." vs "In my game, Super Awesome Adventure, I'm working on X for my Super Awesome Feature, because etc.... paragraph paragraph paragraph, unrelated details, so how do I do X?")

If you want praise:
- It's far easier in real life. Get a support group of people you can discuss your interests with, who will actively listen... and who you can actively listen to when they bring up their interests.
- If that's not feasible, be a regular active part of a chat room, and ask people directly in the chatroom, where it's real-time.

If you want customers:
- Wrong site, bud. This a developer forum. You might get a few customers, because we also play games, but it can rub me the wrong way if you try to hawk merchandise at me.

Or maybe that's just me overthinking everything like usual, but that's why I don't post more to those threads... I want to encourage people, but ultimately, all I can say is, "That looks nice.", for the upteenth time.

It's alot easier for me to praise and interact with journal posts, because after someone's tenth or twelfth post, they forget to act fake, and start opening up about themselves, and about their game, about what they are working on, about what's going on in their life, and begin talking about actually interesting things (instead of trying to sell me a product), which leads me to ask actual questions that I'm actually interested about, allowing real discussions to naturally grow.

tl;dr: I overthink things and am overly critical.

GameDev used to be *much* better at this on the old site, when we had 'Image Of The Day' (instead of the #screenshotsaturday twitter importer we have now).

At that time, all IOTD posts were by actual GameDev users, and carefully moderated and collated by mods/staff, to ensure high-quality, highly relevant content. The old IOTD also allowed one to comment on the posting, so a lot of lively discussion was to be had (I don't think the archive still works for IOTD posts, but you can at least see the comment counts).

Unfortunately, we lost this in the transition to the new site, and there hasn't been a lot of general interest/motivation in bringing it back.

GameDev used to be *much* better at this on the old site, when we had 'Image Of The Day'

The good old days :), it was so inspiring as well.

Unfortunately, we lost this in the transition to the new site, and there hasn't been a lot of general interest/motivation in bringing it back.

I created a topic about this after the transition, but I got the impression you(as in GDNet staff) didn't want to allocate space on the front page for this.

If you want feedback:
- Post a topic in the appropriate game design, programming, writing, or visual arts forum, about the specific thing you want feedback on. Not your game as a whole.

This touches on something that I've been thinking about asking, albeit by a different route: what should one do when one wants general feedback?

To give a concrete example, I've been meaning to post a prototype/test scenario for a game that I'm working on. I don't have a specific mechanic that I want feedback on, in part because most of the mechanics are fairly small and uninteresting by themselves (walking, inventory manipulation, etc.), and in part because I've already had specific feedback on the one somewhat-unusual major feature in the game (the combat mechanic). What I want to know is whether it's holding together: does the movement feel good? Is the climbing mechanic intuitive and effective? Does my approach to combat work in the context of the game? How well do the puzzle minigames fit? And so on.

I suppose that I could put together separate prototypes for some of it--the climbing and the transition to combat, for example--but that wouldn't give me an idea of whether the game works as a whole, and how the pieces work within its context; nor would it turn up those issues that I'm likely to miss by virtue of being the game's developer, and thus somewhat too close to it.