PyTom wrote:Well, this is the WIP section, so it's kind of like - if it's 2 months and you're still not finished, you should probably put it into the main section. The 2 months is more a recognition that 1-month games often run long.
I think the problem is that the "short" in "short noncommercial games" has two very different meanings at the same time.
"Short" in terms of gameplay means "about an hour" for the player and "about 10-20K words in the longest branch" for the developer. It clearly states something about the game itself.
"Short" in terms of development time is the problem because the size and nature of the development team is implicitly taken into consideration.
Let's say we have two games that are exactly the same but have to go into two different forums.
One goes into this forum because it was developed in 1 month by 10 hardened professionals working full-time on it.
But the other goes into the main section just because it was developed by.... (hits the sad violin music) ....a single mum with four kids and two dayjobs who can only spend 1 hour a night to realize her childhood dream of making a short, noncommercial game. A childhood she can barely remember now after many years of hardship. She can only remember the dream.... The dream to show the world, but above all, her children who she was... before the cancer reaches her brain....
*presents Tom with the single mum*
....
Okay, I can see you're still not convinced (darn! I knew I should have made the kids terminal too).
How about this then?
The very title of this forum invites small, entry-level projects well suited for people starting out. Or simply experiments. I feel it's an unassuming, no-pressure forum.
The main section however is filled with these big threads with incredible graphics and big teams. The kind of games people actually pay money for. It's a whole different ball game between them and the newbies/amateurs/hobbyists.
I realize this forum was created as a kind of extended, all-year-round NanoReno but NanoReno is a contest. Contests have time limits but I'm not too sure whether this forum is meant as a contest (I don't see "contest" in the title).
So, why not drop the limit on the development time and just keep the limit on the size of the game (10-20K words)?
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