lol awesome let me know if I can do anything, I am still up for writing some articles especially if its for Iklik
I never took any notice of the religious aspect of the old iklik, even if the main logo did have a huge cross as its main background haha! I did get irritated at Peter the once, seeing as he refused to put my game on the downloads page (it was a bit risque for him I think - it involved farting).
I hope some of the old regulars will return if Iklik V2 comes to fruition.
It's easily a combination of factors, you've got the old guards moving on in their lives as they're getting older; starting families, careers, not having the time to make fun games.
You've got the general falloff in popularity that the klik products are currently in. The base of the product hasn't essentially changed since the TGF/MMF days. Let me put it this way, you can only make an NES game so pretty. Sure you can add new powerups, shiny graphics and the like; but it's still an NES game. Clickteam is a small company and can only do so much, I give them massive credit for what they have and continue to accomplish. But lets face it, it's mostly those who were around in the TGF/MMF days who are still around. Kids today would rather make an iPhone or Flash game. It was totally unique years and years ago, CT had esseentially the whole market; but this has changed in the last years.
Finally, you've got the near impossible barrier to entry in posting a game anymore. Before it was fully possible to spend a week making a game, post it up and people would play it and comment. Now it seems that these fun little games are ignored while everyone waits for the next Mina or Bonesaw. These projects drag out to years and years, then just die. Newbies are quickly discouraged when noone plays their games, and then they fall out of the community. The hostile nature of some of the members of this site don't help either. Basically, we are now getting out of the community what we put in for all those years. For all the good people brought to this community, the bad outweighed it. We've brought up an entire generation of klikers as hostile, over sarcastic, and completely jaded. Why? Because that's how we acted.
But there is hope. I realized this whilst playing Death Giver 2. The comments were all very positive, and the author genuinely seemed thrilled about the response. It's not something that would be considered "normal" around here in the last two years or so. It's a trend that I hope continues. I miss the days when this place was bustling full of activity; watching promising newbies improve their craft and get the recognition they deserve.
Death Giver 2 is a fantastic game that shows what the home-brew community is all about - game-making from the ground up. It's also a great advertising piece for what Clickteam was trying to achieve with KnP all those years back, i.e. that you don't need to be a John Carmack or a Geoff Crammond to be able to make a computer game.
I agree with almost everything you said Shab, but a lot of oldies were i thought quite reasonable on here. When I migrated from iklik I submitted an atrocity of a game called "danger area", and people gave a lot of constructive criticism. I am not to sure where this atmosphere has arisen from.
I'm not saying we all did it. Or that we all did it all the time. But there were some members who did. Those who did left a lasting impression on the community, oftentimes driving the good ones out of the community.
I remember we had a few bullies in the old days. Pod, Hiredgun..some other dudes I can't remember. Those were almost like funny fake accounts. What we have now is totally different and is actually a serious problem. I'd rather have "LOL YOU SUCKS" than "Nah, didn't like it much, 0 stars". I don't like 99% of what gets submitted to this site, and I shut up about it. Nobody is interested in what you don't like, least of all the author.
I don't really see the negativity to the extent some here seem to. I've been noticing quite a bit of constructive criticism lately--far more than I would expect on the internet, and certainly improving.
My memory of Hiredgun was him posting "Nice try but no cigar" on one of my downloads, at least it was better than "meh" or something equally as irritating. I am downloading death giver 2 now. Hoping for some old school klik fun .
I do agree that the community has and will drive people away, it happened to me. Instead of having fun learning on the job and submitting stuff I became obsessed about getting a perfect bug free engine and I was never happy with my graphics as I wanted no bad comments. I now klik for myself, family and friends like pre internet days and I am much happier . Berts adventre will be released online after its been around people I care to give a copy too
This place is great really. I'm not noticing this negativity hayo is complaining about. Really the only thing that annoys me about this place is all the old guys talking about how great the older members were in the glory day. You guys are so focussed on the old members leaving, you haven't noticed the loads of new people we have.
At no point did we mention the older klikers was great. If anything the complexity of games is far higher nowadays, if you was never a member of iklik you have no idea of how nice a klik community can be .
First of all I never complained, I observe. I don't give a shit about it myself but I do care about others. And as far as the "too focussed on old guys" thing goes, I don't know what to say about that. I haven't seen it happen here.
What if we gave VIP members the ability to advertise their download/article/project in 1 of a number of area's on the site, using their DC points?
Set it up so that you pay-per-impression. Say it was 50 points per impression and you pre-paid 1000DC points. You'd get 20 views (excluding your own), before the ad ultimately expired.
This way members with VIP status have another feature and DC points have an added value. And hell, if this works out, maybe we could turn this into a form of real-currency donation for TDC itself.
There would have to be a set standard for the ad, so perhaps a quick admin check off to assure the ad is appropriate, but I believe this would be a very welcome addition to the site. It wouldn't be like product placement or anything because this is something that the site really could benefit from as a community.
PS: The ads would only be able to link to content in our profile. No off-site linking.
Just a quick mock-up image. I doubt the color change would happen because of the different skins and such. There would be an image size restriction dependent on what part of the site your advertising too. Places like forum posts might cost less since people frequently breeze by them.
You'd have control over the ad in your User CP which could display information on how much longer ads have left, how many impressions they've got, whether you want to extend an ad, etc.
Might be an interesting idea to implement for a test run. Could breath some life back into the community itself since it would be entirely self-contained.