C2 - Feature voting system

Hi Ashley,

So I'm always reading posts from people that want a feature added to C2 but feel like they aren't being heard.

I thought It maybe good to build a web based feature/task request system where people can add a feature/task and vote up or down on others. The higher the number of votes the higher the priority/chance of it getting done with your discretion of justifying why something can't or wont be done. This way you get a clear direction from the majority of community of things they want done earlier rather than later.

Unity use a similar system here -> http://feedback.unity3d.com/

Cheers,

Wyrm

I would have thought that it should be up to the developers whether such a system should be implemented.

Ashley does introduce a voting thread from time to time as it is.

The last time there has been a poll, users have massively voted for a multiplayer system that I haven't seen used that much (I'd also expect a lot of users not to be able to use this feature, as networking isn't super user friendly).

Anyway, i'm all about democracy. But I'm not too certain that users here are all about picking features that would benefit everyone, as much as I appreciate the community.

This is why I said "The higher the number of votes the higher the priority/chance of it getting done with your discretion of justifying why something can't or wont be done." If you look at the highest voted thing on the Unity system you will see it's a Linux version of the client. Now that is a huge task and big decision. They don't have to do it they just know the community have given it the most votes. Now if you change the status to 'planned' you will see that they pick and choose the features they want to do.

It's just a big idea/road map communication system.

Great idea, I have a post that i request to add MoveTo behavior to C2, or at least improve Custom Movement behavior.

Lemme just raise that with a soft serve ice cream dispenser, some hacked celebrity pics, and ....oh 3d.

You kind of need to know what can be done before you start making lists, otherwise you're just fueling hype.

I agree with newt

I would also imagine if Ashley wanted a voting system he would have implemented one already.

I'm a little skeptical of voting systems. I do keep a close eye on the forum and the regularity features are mentioned are already a rough sort of voting system. The problems I see with formalising it are:

1) users vote for things which are technically an extraordinary amount of work, or are a completely different product, e.g. 3D. I'd hate to have to keep defending why we are not doing 3D when it's the most voted feature.

2) I am actually a little skeptical that people really know what they want, first with the WebGL shader effects feature, and then much more clearly with the multiplayer feature. Multiplayer was extremely highly voted for in previous polls. We developed it over several months - it was hard work, and involved quite a lot of research and prototyping before that. Despite the huge amount of heavy lifting the multiplayer engine does for you internally, networking is just a difficult topic in general, and I think that's why it's seen fairly low uptake. I think people see features in the voting stage as magical solutions that will solve everything with no effort, but realistically nothing ever turns out like that. I think we documented it well, it's just hard to design multiplayer games. Maybe it will see increased uptake over time, but so far it was an awful lot of effort for a feature that has seen niche use in practice.

3) Users don't see the internal technical complexity. For example a common request is to get the editor tabs to persist the same colors between launches. Seems simple and trivial, but I've looked and it's buried somewhere in the black box of our pre-compiled UI library, so it's really difficult. So then you might have an apparently easy feature really high voted, and everyone's wondering why don't we just do it?!? Accusations follow that we ignore our users, etc.

4) Lots of suggestions come without compelling use cases, e.g. "why don't you make a feature to return the Nth prime number?" Well... why? Who needs it? What do they need it for? Why is it so important? Lots of one-line suggestions lack a thorough definition that identifies it as something really compelling that deserves attention, or are so broadly defined or vague that it's hard to know how to actually address it with code. Every feature we work on comes with opportunity cost - the possibility we're not working on something else that could be even more important.

Obviously we wouldn't exist without our customers, and exist to serve them. However there is a careful balancing act to be made and I think user voting is a pretty distorted version of that. Also, I'm pretty sure Tom has no time to work on it

yes I agree with Ashley, as for me it's hard to make a simple good looking game with a software called C2 which is easy enough to learn.

Now look it in different way Team C2 is making Software itself, so we can just say that, oh I want this in C2 or that, but see the work that have to be done by Team C2, so I think Team C2 know well what is good and what will work.

It's not a joke to maintain C2 with less human resources. It's hard. Try to Understand it.

It seems it's harder to finish existing features than adding new ones...

Trust me, multiplayer will definitely be put to good use eventually. Although I've yet to learn how to implement the details, I'm planning to use it in all my bigger projects now, even though they're mainly singleplayer games, which I didn't even consider before. It's an extremely powerful and game changing feature, and I really do like your serverless architecture which I think is much better suited for indie projects.

Regarding feature requests, the only thing I miss is a dedicated forum for it. I think we would see better ideas, better discussions and less duplicated posts if we put them in a separate forum. And I think it would be easier for you to evaluate their popularity.

Ashley So I see what you're saying and agree, but I think your skepticism may change if you change your point of view. The community will vote on big grand features but you're god and don't have to do it. If you explore what things unity have planned to do from the list they are often things with 50 or so votes which have a small work load and polish off the sharp edges of the existing product. For instance I would quite like small little things like;

• Add the ability to change the webpage background. Using the letterbox feature the page background used to be black but recently it has changed to white. So now I have to manually change the html to black.
• Add an advert bar template page that I can add html to so when I do an export to html with an advert bar it is automatically included rather than me manually adding it every time.

These are small things but the less stuff I have to do outside of C2 the better. They wouldn't make the most voted but they might get a small following.

On the other hand if you do get something crazy with a bazillion votes on then perhaps kickstarter it or add a donate button and employ extra staff to do it when enough money has come in. >:)

Anyway, its all time and money. I personally will be using Construct2 for the next three years after coming out of eight years of commercial development. Check out my linkedin if you're interested (http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mathewnicholas). The choice of using C2 over coding natively or using a html engine with wrapper came down to a few things.

• Project time - The shorter the project time the more games I can produce which increases the chances of hitting it big. I see C2 as something that takes away the burden of programming so I concentrate on getting my ideas working.
• Cross platform - The more platforms I can export it to the more places in can sell and potentially take off. All from one code base. As you may have noticed I have concentrated on making my way through all of the mobile export options, at present I am making my way through blackberry and intend to do Tizen next. They are probably are not worth the effort BUT you never know.

The future for C2 in my opinion should focus on social network integration for all mobile exports. This is the most important marketing feature for small independent game companies. If developers can incentivise the feature so the gamers that are playing game are advertising for free to their friends then this is great. I understand that this requires collaboration from third parties but it is one of the top features required features imo. Does the facebook object work for windows phone, blackberry and Tizen?

For my monetisation options I have used something similar to the candy crush saga. You use lives by failing levels, these lives regenerate over time. For this I had use a plugin made by rex that allowed me to get a unix timestamp so I could calculate how much time had passed between game sessions. I would quite like to see an official version on this built into C2. I don't mind using plugins but it means I can't publish to the scirra arcade <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_sad.gif" alt=":(" title="Sad">.

I would also like the ability to be able to disable plugins within C2. Why? If I delete a plugin it takes away all the events associated with it. For instance FGL made a plugin that shows a tester splashscreen at the start of the game. It allows you to turn things on and off i.e. branding. So as soon as I add this I have to fork out my project and make changes to both OR re-add the FGL plugin with all the associated events. I assume this would be the same case for unsupported plugins for the scirra arcade? At the end of the day I just one build that I can configure to work everywhere.

newt spongehammer Fueling hype? Surely its a place where things can be officially addressed by C2.

Let me start it off 'soft serve ice cream dispenser, some hacked celebrity pics, and ....oh 3d' - Not on the roadmap. [Closed] So now any people expecting those features can go elsewhere.

Unity has one of the largest developer communities in the world, which was nurtured by allowing the community to communicate what they wanted, filtering it and providing what fits with their goals. As you can see hype has toppled them to their knees.

TheWyrm

It would make more sense for Ashley to produce a list and for a vote to take place on that than have everyone pitch in with unworkable, expensive or just plain stupid requests.

I am sure most users of C2 have their own list of things they would like to see but then most users (me included) have no idea what it would take to implement them.

Ashley The super smart WebGL shaders support is actually what made me jump from Gamemaker to C2!

I launched C2 for the first time, quiclky added an effect on the top layer, and was blown away by how it easy it was.

This was a great, great new feature, and is always a huge success when I show it to other devs, might they use Unity, GM or XNA.

Please do not consider it as a minor update, for experienced graphic artists, this is really (one of) the strongest feature of C2!