Adventure Gamers - Forums

This is a fine site, but I think it could offer so much more. It should be the “go to” or starting place for people seeking adventure game news and opinions. One thing adventure game fans always want to know is what the new adventure game projects are, and, as we all know, Kickstarter has played an important role lately in several new AG projects. Indiegogo and Steam Greenlight are also significant. I think you guys should have a feature called “Adventure Funding Watch” or “Adventure Game Scouter” (or something similar) which basically just summarizes all the adventure games on Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Steam Greenlight. Basically, it would just be a constantly-updated round-up of information. It would be an English version of this summary:
http://www.adventure-treff.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=475159#p475159

If you had all this info in one place, it would be a valuable resource and people would link to it constantly. There would be no need for any commentary on such a page. It would be just for facts, and it could have “top 5 highest percent funded of initial goal” and other such lists. Hint: just use what that German post has to get started.

There could be a link to this page always in the top menu. If you guys had done something like this, there wouldn’t have been a need for that Kickstart Ventures blog.

Please consider this! It would basically just be accumulating and updating links and numbers now and then. People would check it constantly. Not doing it is such a missed opportunity.

Also, another suggestion… On your home page I don’t think you should mix in headlines for reviews of older games with headlines for new game reviews and other news. It’s a bit confusing and I think makes people wonder what this site is for. I think the older game reviews could be listed somewhere separate.

We’ve already considered such ideas about Kickstarter and Steam, and may yet implement them. Everything takes time and planning to incorporate, though, and those are in very short supply these days (well, always). But don’t be surprised if you see something along those lines in some form or another in future.

As for whether we’re the “go to” place for people to find news, however, we really already are.  At least for those who check the site every few days.  Even if you don’t, there are easy links to browse back through news, new videos, screenshots, etc.  Anyone wondering if there have been any new Kickstarters in the last month can easily find out with about three or four clicks in total. What you’re suggesting isn’t necessarily any easier or more useful to 99.9% of our readers; it’s simply more condensed.

As for the older reviews, we don’t have any other place to display them, so it’s the home page or nowhere. And the writers who work so hard to do these reviews have earned that honour.  I doubt anyone who’s visited AG more than a handful of times is at all confused when we (very, very) occasionally do a flashback review. So there won’t be any changes where those are concerned. But since it maybe be many long months until the next one, it’s really a non-issue.

The only “improvement” or change that could be done to better differentiate the flashback reviews on the frontpage could be marking them as a retro review, rather than just a review like with newly released titles.

Personally I don’t need that differentiation, but I don’t know if there’s a general need for it for the more casual visitors?

Well, the word “review” isn’t a description so much as an administrative designation so that the article is automatically stored in the right place. If it’s tagged as a review it goes into the review section. There’s no such place as a “retro review” section, so there’s no such label to go with it.

I’m not saying there aren’t workarounds to get past this, but for such a trivial issue it’s not worth the effort. 

Thanks for the reply!

The Kickstart Ventures blog didn’t come together exactly how I hoped it would (though maybe it will get better), and I think this site could step up and do it right. Adventure game fans deserve a concise (providing only basic facts about/links to the campaigns), well-organized, comprehensive summary of *all* AG KS and Greenlight projects in one place/on one page.

As I mentioned earlier, the authors of that German post did a lot of the work already in gathering the info up to this point.

You could have “current campaigns” at top. And then, under that, a list of all previous campaigns and their respective results. You could also have other Top 5 lists, just for fun and to see how the campaigns compare with one another. Doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. If the “past campaigns” list gets too long, you could break it down by year.

Next to each title (which would also include the brief description/subtitle provided to KS by the project managers) you could also have a thumbnail image of each game’s official KS banner art. But try to shrink the banner image, if possible, so that we can see a lot of info at one glance and wouldn’t have to scroll down the page, because of big images taking up space vertically, for a long time when reading all the info.

It’s really shocking to me that all this info has only been compiled on that German forum. This is an example of how basic info organization and compilation can be extremely beneficial.

I doubt we’d go anywhere near those lengths. Our priority would be current campaigns, plain and simple, since that’s all that really matters.

Really, those kinds of master lists you’re talking about should be done by hobbyists with a limited focus and enough time to delve into stuff like that. Those sorts of things may be fun resources for super-diehard adventure fans with a passing curiosity, but really they’re of no use to anyone else.

We’re plenty busy enough just staying on top of what’s new in the adventure world without trying to monitor everything that’s ever happened in it. 

Well, something is better than nothing. But what are you going to do once a campaign ends? Might as well keep the info posted, but just move it to another section.

And there are plenty of reasons for linking to completed KS campaigns. The most obvious is that the updates on those pages (of successful campaigns) continue to be posted for many months afterwards. So I would disagree with your conclusion that only active campaigns matter. Many people are interested in certain projects, even if they didn’t back them.

Kickstarter is such an important phenomenon for adventure gaming right now, and I think it deserves its own section on the site. I believe it’s more relevant than some of the reviews of very old games you have in your front page headlines.

Anyway, thanks for the response!! Looking forward to whatever you come up with.

One other thing…

The thing that got me thinking about this was when I discovered that KS doesn’t categorize games. They’re all just thrown in “video games” or something like that. I often want to look at all the AG projects on the site, and I always refer to that German post, which isn’t convenient, given that I don’t understand German. Hehe

I brought this up because I felt like there was a need to “filter out” the AG projects. Most people don’t have the time to search through the whole KS site or read all kinds of forums or news sites to learn of all the AG projects.

So, basically, the feature I propose/request is like an AG “filter” of sorts. Hope that explained it better. Even if it’s just from the present day forward, that’s better than nothing.

Oh sure, we’d probably keep an archive of completed campaigns that appear on our list, but going back to the beginning and trying to dredge up information on everything that’s come before sounds like one of those nice ideas that no one ever really has time to do.

But you never know; maybe one of those hobbyists I mentioned will want that responsibility here.

Sounds good. I know you’re busy, and anything you do will be appreciated!

Thanks again for taking the time to hear suggestions.

Great addition. Thumbs up, guys