19 - The terror of pregnancy

[miumiaou]

(Actually I check the forum at least twice a day and I often see other people logged in, it's just that we have zero things to reply) you didn't failed, you have a really large community behind you! (hey! 781 persons is something! if you think it isn't enough try and launch a Patreon). Things didn't failed yet, at least not until your dead. If you have to bow your head now, later you can come back to us with something. (and in France we say "you can have lost a battle, but you can still win the war") Even if this campaign fail, you can still count on us to cheer you up (after all we're friends, no?)

But Matt, you're our leader, nothing could have happened without you, this is why you shouldn't talk about failing until the very end of this campaign, for this is the only way to really fail

[evilkinggumby]

Well, I'm not sure I would shut it down. Maybe long long long term, but I think having a forum to discuss Neverending Nightmares and whatever isn't a bad thing. Will I keep posting developer diaries? Maybe not. Will I check it as frequently? That really depends on how frequently other people are posting. I think presently, you are probably the only one who checks it every day, so if I'm posting new developer diaries, I'm not sure if we'll have anything to talk about. haha

Maybe I am just in a bad mood, but I think my experiment in community building and open development kind of failed. I thought the advantage of pouring so much time into my community was that we'd get support for things like kickstarter. While it may be true, I think it works on a much smaller scale than I'd hoped. Would my time be better spent on development? Maybe. Again, perhaps this is just my mood, but I'm really feeling like I'd rather be in a position as an indie where I have a publisher take care of marketing and promotion (and hopefully funding), and I can just put my head down and focus on development. Perhaps that's unrealistic (our Neverending Nightmares Deluxe Edition totally fell through) but I am kind of tired of wearing so many hats... Maybe being a grunt in another studio won't be so bad? :-/

Haha well there ya go.. there's at least 2 of us on here daily.

Sorry this all has you in a bad/negative mood. I guess though it is to be expected, so I can't blame ye. This all is a bad state of affairs.

You are right though, not doing dev diaries anymore means less to post to this forum and so less reason for people to come here. So in time it'll become a ghost town and then..well.. why keep it up? Sucks to think of that though. I hope possibly as your other future plans and projects come up you might use this as a sounding board and keep interest going. As you said, this is a good place for fans to come for tech support and stuff too!

The concept of open development is a kool one but I find MOST gamers aren't really interested in participating in it when the door is left WIDE open. With the project "Among The Sleep" they had a forum and were actively engaging with their fans and backers and worked with them closely through development and on the free DLC, but ultimately only a handful of active participants came around, despite the success and love the game has. The forums for Ghost of A Tale are fairly quiet now too, and they get frequent big coverage for the game at con's and in multiple magazines and web/tv shows.

With so many campaigns going it is hard to get passionate and be fully active in all of the different games. Effectively you are vying for collaboration from fans alongside hundreds of other game projects. Just to give you a sense, Krillbite backed Among the Sleep via 8,110 and yet their forums only sported a few dozen people, less than a dozen upon the game's release. Ghost of a tale was backed by 1,190 people and their forums only sport 198 members, some of which have only ever logged in once, and some BOTS and spam accounts.

NeN got backed by 3,608 people and you have a total of about 12% of that as registered members here. Granted some of those members are here for DD and others for RetroGrade, but thats still not too shabby. I guess I am not sure how many you expected to try and participate?

[matt]

I guess I didn't know what to expect, but I was hoping we'd have a core group of 30 or so that would check the forum frequently, and maybe more drift in and out. Perhaps my expectations were unreasonable as you've said. I'm not in a rush to shut down the forum or anything, but the main topic is the developer diaries (to which EvilKingGumby is the only person who usually responds), so if I stop doing those, then.... Who knows. I guess we'll see. I might still do a few here and there, but I don't think I'm going to keep up my pace of 3 a week, which is a fair amount of work...

[evilkinggumby]

. I'm not in a rush to shut down the forum or anything, but the main topic is the developer diaries (to which EvilKingGumby is the only person who usually responds), so if I stop doing those, then....

then you can have a lot more peace and quiet! lol... It's ok. you can say it hehehe

It would be kool even if you dropped the dev diaries down to once a month to leave time for everything else. It would make the boards a lot quieter, but still spark conversation I am sure. really, go with what you are comfortable with. if you prefer doing one a week or one every 2 weeks, go for it. if thats too much, spread it out. since you wouldn't be running a Kickstarter or an active open source game necessarily, doing the diaries can branch out into any topic or style you choose. a friend of mine that is an author is running a VLOG on youtube that is just updates and short discussions (2-3 minutes usually) in preparation to then do a series of tutorials on writing and getting published. Eventually with all that practice he wants to do mini films and local filmmaking for folk needing a crew. So yeah.. you could do anything from continuing talk directly relevant to the games, shift to game making in a general sense, tips for game design, software insight and reviews, kickstarters you are interested in, fashion tips for the up and coming indie dev, convention news... whatever just have to find your interests and passion.

or ya know..abandon it entirely and herde goats.

[matt]

Well, I have one or two I think I already recorded, and I have a few things that I'd like to talk about soon, so I'm sure I won't stop cold turkey. It might just be a while before I upload them since our baby is due soon, so I'm pretty busy.

Thanks for the advice!

[evilkinggumby]

Good luck with the delivery and first glimpses with the baby!! You are in the home stretch now so it'll be a high stress couple days but then after the birth you'll breath a sigh of relief for..well.. maybe a day or so .. then the lil guy goes home and.. back to high stress LOL.

but it's worth it. totally. I'm teaching my lil guy how to master controlling his fingers so he will be a great gamer as he gets older.. hehehe.... such fun.