[POLL] DOES RPG MAKER NET HAVE LOW ENGAGEMENT RATE?

Poll

Does RPG Maker net have a lower than average engagement rate for the submissions? - Results

Yes
13
52%
No
12
48%

Posts

author=kentona
RMN was not created or designed with commercial games in mind (in fact, way back when it was passively hostile against commercial games - there weren't really any avenues for RM games to to be sold, those that were were shady af, and RM2k/3 were illegally translated and that what most people had to work with). And I haven't made a concerted effort to redesign RMN in 5 years.

I should get on that. Or someone should.


Time it to coincide with the release of Hero's Realm.
author=InfectionFiles
I feel that engaging with other people's game is also a good start for people to in turn check out yours. I see you haven't commented on anyone's game on here.


Haven't had the time to play any, I have been so busy setting my own business running. I'll try to be more active now that I can actually do stuff.
I hope you can garner some more attention : )

As others said, I think it's perfectly okay to just explain how things work here - most users here are part dev, with at least an interest in it.
I used to just browse games here and only when I wanted to interact and do stuff (namely, reviews) did I sign up.
I think that's where the demo thing comes in as well, if I can't access anything on-site I am like "uh .. okay, maybe later" and that later never comes hahaha.
That's not to say demos are needed, but I quite like them when they are there (I just tried out the Paint it Back demo, on steam actually, and I quite like it. I think I will pick it up eventually)

I think there are things to touch up your game page (which you did and which is totally cool), and as you said, you did your share of advertising, and it worked wonderfully on other sites.
So just be cool with your effort and stuff, you did well, and it just works a lil differently here. If you do mingle, even just in off-topic stuff, more people click.
There are a lot of gameprofiles here and especially the regulars are kinda flooded with stuff, so going by people you know (or just out of curiosity, trying finding out more about them) people WILL check your stuff out.
I have actually had peeps comment on my profile and absence of games and surprise thereof in pms haha.

Okay? Remember you are totally 100% guilt-free and innocent, allowed to feel good about yourself and your presence here. (as the typical constructive criticism goes, people WILL usually always present ideas and ways to optimize stuff lol, so just take it with a grain of salt)
Getting more views and interactions just has a different flow, and it also has a good deal of luck as well. But, speaking from most people's experience here, if you mingle it works best, that's why they tell you that stuff.
It'll be cool to see you around if you have the time and care : ) (I know I have Deltree's game on my wishlist : D)

And if not, that's cool too.

Hope that makes sense : D
Enjoy your stay~

PS: As for the engagement rate, no idea. It is very engaging within its community, with a lot of collaboration and helping each other going on, but it is also tricky outside of it.
I used to seek out new submissions because of this, so they get at least a review going. (omitting commercial releases tho haha)
I'm pretty sure Tuomo_L was quite a prominent member of the community at one point and could quite easily ride on old merits if he wanted to.
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
author=Kylaila
I think that's where the demo thing comes in as well, if I can't access anything on-site I am like "uh .. okay, maybe later" and that later never comes hahaha.
That's not to say demos are needed, but I quite like them when they are there (I just tried out the Paint it Back demo, on steam actually, and I quite like it. I think I will pick it up eventually)


Another factor I thought of reading this: RMN is generally devoted to free amateur games, so the people who play are a lot more likely to be leery of paying money, whether from habit, because they're tightwads, or just plain can't afford to buy a lot of games. (Yes, even for four bux.)

Remember you are totally 100% guilt-free and innocent, allowed to feel good about yourself and your presence here. (as the typical constructive criticism goes, people WILL usually always present ideas and ways to optimize stuff lol, so just take it with a grain of salt)
Getting more views and interactions just has a different flow, and it also has a good deal of luck as well. But, speaking from most people's experience here, if you mingle it works best, that's why they tell you that stuff.


And here comes Ky to say what I was trying to say but without sounding like a dick like I did XD
Always at your service : )
*chuckle* We just help each other out, yes?
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
Petition to canonize Kylaila. <3
author=Shinan
I'm pretty sure Tuomo_L was quite a prominent member of the community at one point and could quite easily ride on old merits if he wanted to.


Indeed, I have been making games for 17 years and have made more games than most people combined.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
I know I've never had any luck finding a wife here... wait, that's now what this is about?
-----

I know exactly what you're talking about. I bust my ass for my stuff to very little fanfare. It's honestly quite

But I do like how closely your hero graphic style resembles that of mamabliss, a respected artist in their own right.
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
author=Tuomo_L
author=Shinan
I'm pretty sure Tuomo_L was quite a prominent member of the community at one point and could quite easily ride on old merits if he wanted to.
Indeed, I have been making games for 17 years and have made more games than most people combined.


Yup. Hi Tuomo_L. It's CashmereCat, a.k.a. thatbennyguy. We used to chat on Skype often.

Anyway, I thought I'd give my honest input here. I quite liked Dooms 2, and the original Save Your Mother was pretty nice, even if it could have been improved by some refinements.

It'd be great to have RMN be a good hub for commercial games. Some like Remnants of Isolation, Last Word and Soma Spirits have been hosted here to some success. But to expect great levels of engagement might be setting yourself up for failure, not because engagement is impossible, but it's usually afforded to pretty profiles or well-respected members who already have a following due to cranking out great games. But even then, it might be hard for them to get a lot of engagement commercially if they don't use other channels.

It seems Save Your Mother in particular just went under the radar. I knew about it, but although I see there's been a lot of effort put into it, it just didn't seem like my cup of tea. Although I appreciate it has its merits. It just didn't appeal to me all that much. I'd rather play something story driven from you since I feel that's your strength but this looks very mechanics driven and abstract. I might buy it but probably not.

I wish you all the best in your commercial endeavours!
Wait, so Tuomo_L was Mister Big T? Ah, now I know who he is.

Anyway, Tuomo, I know you've moved on from the past, but I think you still have a long way to go in terms of making it big in the commercial game making business. It's a whole different ball game from making games as a hobby, just so you know.
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
author=CashmereCat
well-respected members who already have a following due to cranking out great games.


Don't forget the following also comes from being p. active in events and teamups and stuff. You gotta network!
InfectionFiles
the world ends in whatever my makerscore currently is
4622
I thought the name sounded familiar.

If that's the case then they should know better or at least enough about RMN lol
author=CashmereCat
author=Tuomo_L
author=Shinan
I'm pretty sure Tuomo_L was quite a prominent member of the community at one point and could quite easily ride on old merits if he wanted to.
Indeed, I have been making games for 17 years and have made more games than most people combined.
Yup. Hi Tuomo_L. It's CashmereCat, a.k.a. thatbennyguy. We used to chat on Skype often.

Anyway, I thought I'd give my honest input here. I quite liked Dooms 2, and the original Save Your Mother was pretty nice, even if it could have been improved by some refinements.

It'd be great to have RMN be a good hub for commercial games. Some like Remnants of Isolation, Last Word and Soma Spirits have been hosted here to some success. But to expect great levels of engagement might be setting yourself up for failure, not because engagement is impossible, but it's usually afforded to pretty profiles or well-respected members who already have a following due to cranking out great games. But even then, it might be hard for them to get a lot of engagement commercially if they don't use other channels.

It seems Save Your Mother in particular just went under the radar. I knew about it, but although I see there's been a lot of effort put into it, it just didn't seem like my cup of tea. Although I appreciate it has its merits. It just didn't appeal to me all that much. I'd rather play something story driven from you since I feel that's your strength but this looks very mechanics driven and abstract. I might buy it but probably not.

I wish you all the best in your commercial endeavours!

My next game will be more story oriented long one. I hope I'll be able to release it this year still, at least to Early Access. I'll be posting stuff about it sometime in future. The team's basically same as the one I did Save Your Mother with and will have even bigger budget.

Also I've not seen you in Skype forever, we need to chat up again.

Yeah, Save Your Mother is very "unlike me" game in more ways than one but it's because I made it originally for a contest and also because I tried to make something nicer.


I have ideas also for my first 3D game which will be totally different but it's still in on only planning stage.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
Okay, played for about an hour. There are a lot of flaws here. We've got a five minute intro at the very start of the game. For one, having to sit five minutes before I can play the game is just at the length where its too long to keep the player waiting. The intro starts telling you about the gods, then tells you that the gods aren't important to the story, and tells us about the protagonist.

This would have been a great time to use some in-engine gameplay to build the relationship between the mother and child. Maybe see the protagonist and how she interacted with her mother while she was alive. But instead, we are just told everything up to her death and our quest to save her in the scrolling text. For five minutes.

Then we are plopped inside the dungeon. Some of the actual dungeon exploration bits aren't too bad, but the battle system is a big problem. You get a fire spell and that's it for abilities, unless I missed something. I have one party member. Thus my options in battle are "Attack, use Fire Spell, Guard, Use Item." There are enemies that resist the fire spell, and then you just gotta spam attack. There are enemies that are immune to my attack, so then its Fire spell over and over.

Battles are very boring. Only having one character to work with limits things. Things are even more limited when that character doesn't have a lot of options. The only thing that gives it any excitement is the fact that if you don't input commands, the enemy will keep attacking you. I would prefer some real strategy that allows me to be rewarded for making smart choices.

There is a lot of polish here. There's voice acting in battles where the heroine makes noises every time she is hit. The portraits move and blink and appear to be talking. There are a lot of lighting and particle effects. Battles, for all their lack of strategy, at least feel bombastic and bosses are huge.

But a lot of the little details are off. Mapping is sparse and rooms are very square-ish. For example, look at this lava-room under the hide-tag below.



The whole chamber is a big rectangle and doesn't look like a cave or tunnel. The only details here are the fires and the lava. There's an alternate path but it dead-ends with no treasure.

Something feels off about the main character's sprite. She doesn't walk on the same level as all the other sprites. I was confused by this until figuring out that her sprite has been squashed. You can see it clearly during the hallucination stage when she sees an un-squashed version of herself:



This game has merit, and obviously a lot of work put into it. The artwork is lovely, and there are nice bits here and there, like the coffin mini-game and the hallucination stage, which was very cool. You are obviously a talented developer. But this game is making a lot of the same mistakes as plenty of free games on here, and that's a bit of a disappointment for a game that costs money.
Honestly, I've considered playing your game a few times in the past but a few things pulled me up and I never did.
1 - I've only ever seen the same images over and over again on various sites and they don't appeal to me. The image of the girl being fat, the image of too much cleavage, the image of fat spider... they really don't interest me that much. The same video too. You're just showing the same stuff over and again. Not exactly interesting.
2 - XP. I hate that engine and I'm already less inclined to play games made in it because of how clunky and bleh it can be. Personal bias but I know there's a fair few out there who share it.
3 - Dooms. Yes, I know you've changed your name and such to try and get away from your past but I can't help but remember, even if the game isn't the same as the ones you used to make. That said, you've done all you can to eliminate that from others (especially new people who don't know the series) so that's a plus.
4 - The mapping. Sorry, but what I have seen of the game mapping-wise just doesn't interest me at all. It's very blah and the times that people have pointed out things that you could fix, you've instead explained away or did fix but in weird ways. Some areas are interesting, but a lot of them are bland or typical.
5 - Pricing... well I'm not really one for purchasing RM games on steam unless there's something about them that catches my eye. I'd probably purchase this at some point if I'd seen it on steam, if only to support you because I know you personally as a developer, but I wouldn't be buying it for the game. It'd sit in my game list without being played or installed unless I was asked to LP it or something by someone. I wouldn't play it for my own enjoyment though. Sorry. ^.^;

Quite frankly, I lean on the whole "please do have a demo" crowd side. Even a short 10 minute taste of the game is enough. It gives you a good idea about how the game plays and how it feels to play it, how it controls and how it sounds. You can't replicate that with a video - there's a lot of videos out there that cherry-pick pieces of scenes/gameplay/etc and when you get the game it feels completely different. Giving a possible player something to actually try out and feel for themselves is a good idea - hell, pick a good cliff-hanger and give them that piece to try out, if you're having a hard time thinking of a good place to stop.

Honestly, the reason Ara Fell got big was because a constant presence was felt with the updating - there were new, interesting, WIP images in the screenshot thread, there were new videos showing small bits here and there, engagement by those working on the game, and when it came out a few people were approached about reviewing both here and on steam, with offers of a Steam Key if agreed. There was also a really nice demo that showcased the game well - how the gameplay worked, what battles felt like and ending on an interesting point so that people would want to check it out and see the full story.

(I will point out that despite people having played the FULL free version of the game, many still bought and played the updated version.)
Sailerius
did someone say angels
3214
RMN has a very poor engagement rate because the limitations of the RM engines combined with the shared interest in oldschool RPGs means that the majority of the titles on the site appear very similar. In order to attract someone's eye, you need to stand out from the rest somehow. This isn't so much of a problem on general-purpose communities because you're not competing for attention with every other RPG.
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
author=Liberty
2 - XP. I hate that engine and I'm already less inclined to play games made in it because of how clunky and bleh it can be. Personal bias but I know there's a fair few out there who share it.


It's VXAce, he just decided to use XP RTP because... reasons? vOv
author=Sooz
author=Liberty
2 - XP. I hate that engine and I'm already less inclined to play games made in it because of how clunky and bleh it can be. Personal bias but I know there's a fair few out there who share it.
It's VXAce, he just decided to use XP RTP because... reasons? vOv

Huh, right you are. It feels like an XP game though, which is one thing that really turned me off. Well, lemme strike that off the list of issues I have with it personally then. (Still, if I made that mistake, I'm sure others might have as well.)
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
Yo T, why did you decide to go with XP RTP in Ace?