Hey!
So I guess I'm fairly new here, I came to the site from a GameMaker background when I released a project a couple of months ago. I really like the site, the community is small but friendly and it's a really open platform for distribution in my mind because there aren't any restrictions on OS or the language used to develop. The revenue share is nice too, I’ve made like, 44 cents but it’s not about the money really, more the mentality of being open to this I think. Basically I just wanted to say how positive my experience here has been and that I definitely plan on using the site for future projects.
I also have a few suggestions about what I would like to see improved:
The single most aspect I wish that was different is the layout of the game overview page. I've been using the site as my primary link and I'm quite happy to do so because it offers comments, ratings, download counts, revenue etc but if this site is to be such a provider there needs to be the option for some kind of banner/image on the game's landing page. I would really like the page to look more like this. At the moment it's all rather bare and lacking in presentation. Being able to direct link is a great feature but sometimes it's nice to send people to the main page as an introduction so they can get a feel for the work and see the comments and such.
I can see why it works like this because you need to attract new members to the site, but I wish guests could post comments on games. Spam might be an issue but guest comments could be moderated by the creator as well as disabled if they wanted to. As a developer it makes me wonder how much more feedback I might have gotten knowing that most of my downloads wouldn’t have had Game Jolt accounts.
It'd be cool if you could get a graph similar to the revenue report for game downloads or even integrate the two.
In terms of browsing, I guess this is a bit of a nitpick but I found it annoying when searching games by category that a lot of the first ones to appear are rated 5 by a single rating, placed above those with say 4 but with 40 or 50 ratings. So few ratings aren’t really a very good indication of quality good or bad, it makes me want to rate some games low just to balance it out. It would be better if there were a threshold (could be quite a low) of ratings required to appear like this or some kind of averaging between the different stats. I dunno, I’m of two minds because it’s good to give new games a shot but from the perspective of a player visiting the site looking for a game, it’s slightly misleading.
Oh also, having only one game at the moment I'm not sure about how this works but it would be good to be able to rearrange games on your profile or even hide certain games so mini games or smaller works don't appear over main projects!
I hope this feedback is useful in same way and apologies if this stuff has already been suggested or is in the works!
Last edited on August 9, 2012 - 08:47 AM by Jordan Browne
