Nimbus! - AGS Steam - PreAlpha release

[Ryan Timothy B]

"if you like this game, you should also try these three:"

But you can't offer this method without actually having a user rating system. How else would it rate that you've liked that game?

It should have all the searching/categorizing features suggested here along with a user rating. How you choose to sort the games you want to download, that's up to you.


Anyway, Calin, with the game list. When you're searching for a game to download, it should exclude games that you already currently have downloaded. With perhaps an option in the preferences menu to have those games still show on the search list, just a darker shade of gray or something.

Also, when you're in the My Downloads list (or whatever it's called), it should have a Rate Game button to the side of each game that you haven't rated yet. Or a different colored 5 stars/cups/whatever to show that you haven't rated it yet. Basically something to indicate that you haven't actually rated it yet.
It would be cool if you could change your rating at anytime, just in case you change your mind or play the game again. etc.

[ddq]

Geez, what's wrong with having game ratings? Everyone is throwing around "subjectivity" and "opinions" as reasons why you can't include ratings but a score that represents at least an average opinion of a game's quality is really helpful for me in finding games. I understand that the average user will dismiss low-rated games just by the score, but if the game wasn't good enough to earn a score that could be generally agreed with, that's just the risk one takes on the Internet.

One option for clearly broken in terms of compleatability, not quality, could be a tag or icon that indicates "this game is reported to have a game-breaking bug" or something.

[Dualnames]

Drew has a point. Okay how's this. A rating to 5 stars/cups/nexuses. And then you can drop down a list (similar to the youtube description), showing the following

CalinLeafshade 4 stars
DDQ                  5 stars
qptain_nemp    1 star
Dualnames       4 stars

That'd be cool. So you can find your friends or someone you trust (like last.fm works) and play the games he has rated highly.

[Radiant]

"if you like this game, you should also try these three:"

But you can't offer this method without actually having a user rating system. How else would it rate that you've liked that game?

Sure you can. It finds random games from the same genre category, or with the same cloud tags.

Just to throw some more ideas out there - the most effective rating system is probably the one used by rottentomatoes.com, which simply asks "did you like this movie yes/no", and prints that "4738 out of 12893 people like this movie". This is good because any other system is arbitrary: if the scale is, say, one to ten, people can and will disagree whether a seven means "good", "somewhat above average", or "mediocre"; and there are always people who'll simply vote "10" for all games they like, and "1" for all games they don't.

[tzachs]

Home of the Underdogs had a great feature that "if you like this game, you should also try these three:"

That's true, but the Underdogs also had a ratings system.
I believe most of the users will find the ratings system useful, and those who won't can simply not use it.

[Calin Leafshade]

Dual:
I have already planned to implement a system which shows what your friends thought of a game.

like on the games page it would have something like:

Your friends said this about this game:

Dualnames - *****
"This game is super awesome!"

Ben304 - **
"This game sucks but i'm Australian so what do I know."

and so on.

[Dualnames]

Nice to hear.
Oh, well carry on then.

Suggestions like IMDB does, based on genre and keyword match, would also be cool.

[Peder 🚀]

One option for clearly broken in terms of compleatability, not quality, could be a tag or icon that indicates "this game is reported to have a game-breaking bug" or something.

A "report a bug" function here would be usefull for the developers..
About any type of rating system I think a "like/not like" function would be the best.
Though I don't usually care how many people have liked something or not when I try new games .

[Mr Flibble]

How about this? Ask people to rate a game after playing it in Nexus. Then use that.

A system like that would also be useful for suggesting other games to play next.

[GarageGothic]

How about this? Ask people to rate a game after playing it in Nexus. Then use that.

Perhaps it would be a bit cheeky, but a big "rate this" pop-up (which can of course be declined) as a default part of the uninstall procedure would certainly make me a lot more likely to rate a game that I normally wouldn't bother to give my opinion on. Other than that, if we could agree on a standard system where games write to a specific file upon finishing it, that could be used to trigger a rating pop-up after exiting. I don't like the idea of being asked every time I played it for a few minutes (unless it was totally unobtrusive), that'd be as much of a pain in the ass as Skype's call quality survey.

Also, no need to encourage rating a game until the user has either finished the game or given up on it

[Mr Flibble]

I was moreso thinking of just being able to give feedback on a game at any time, from the list of downloaded games in my imaginary picture of the Nexus browser. Like eBay feedback. I agree that a pop-up or prompt would be far too invasive.

[therantingrob]

Now, would you consider it a positive or negative if Nexus only accepted games which would be considered 'proper games' and not anything that is submitted.

I'm finding it difficult to know where to draw the line. I need to find a balance between not alienating the developer base and providing players with games of a certain calibre.

I think a Nexus-internal ranking system which allows players who played through a game to rate certain categories with a 1-10 "star" or points system would be a good thing to sort the good from the bad over a period of time.

the point is to make the rating window pop up after the game has been played through.
not making it entirely optional. to motivate lazy people  :
for instance, the rating system of "Little Big Planet" works this way and it has proven to sort the well-designed content from the alpha or beta testing stage content.
(although there might be a tendency to accumulate overly positive or negative ratings because the user wants to "get done with that annoying survey".)

[ddq]

Have it ask for a rating after playing new games by default, but have the option to disable it in the preferences. And only ask for a rating once per game, of course. How will you tell that they've finished the game, though? It might be weird for longer games if they open it, play half of it, save, quit, and be prompted to give it a score.

[Ryan Timothy B]

The popup once you've closed the game should have a Vote Now or Next Time I Close the Game option.

[GarageGothic]

How will you tell that they've finished the game, though? It might be weird for longer games if they open it, play half of it, save, quit, and be prompted to give it a score.

if we could agree on a standard system where games write to a specific file upon finishing it, that could be used to trigger a rating pop-up after exiting.

Would be as simple as a script module imported in the editor and called from the game's ending screen. Nexus would presumably already have full access to the game's save/config folder for the sake of uninstall, so checking for the existence of a specific "proof of completion" file should be trivial.

[Ryan Timothy B]

It's a neat idea, but as Calin stated, he wants to make the nexus for AGS games now and other indie games later.
So that system would only work for those who actually care enough about nexus and enough to put in a module to create a file upon completion. I know I'd probably never put one in my games.. mostly because I'd never think about it before releasing it.

Can't it just check if the game is still running? Is that not possible?


Anyway, I forgot about Do Not Vote for a third button on the popup after the game is finished. So I say it should have these buttons: Vote Now | Do Not Vote | Vote Later
And my opinion matters because I'm radtastic.

[GarageGothic]

Well, my point wasn't to trigger the rating dialog when you exit the game, but only after playing it to completion (or upon uninstall, in which case the player has made his mind up not to finish it). Of course this differs between game genres too, but it should be within everybody's interest that games aren't rated after two minutes of play - you could also leave it up to the author to decide when to prompt for a rating (though it should always be possible to rate the game unprompted of course), so the maker of a platform game could trigger it for 15+ minutes of play, while someone releasing a mystery game may not want to encourage players to rate it until after the mid-game plot twist.

Sorry for rambling, I just think it would be a cool idea to encourage people to vote but also don't want a rating dialog to pop up every time I close the game. Haven't necessarily thought the idea through

[SSH]

Could you have a Like.dislike button on each rating/review so that people can say which are useful reviews and which ones are just "Dualnames sux, hahahah". Then each user's reviews can be shown with their +/- score so people who can't tell their Leons from their Iceys can get an idea about the reliability of different reviewers?

[Peder 🚀]

I haven't read the whole thread but have you considered adding emulation support so DOS AGS games will work straight from Nexus? That'd be a pretty cool feature.

I am planning for something like this for agsarchives.com with help from Arj0n, and Calin will have full access to those files for Nexus.

[Calin Leafshade]

Actually thats already been done.

Nexus runs a version of dosbox for the games.