We started a discussion in the staff forum about how to deal with the fact that the Interguild is becoming dead, and I figured that this was a discussion that we really should be having with the entire community. Here's what we've said so far:

















I kinda agree with Sefro that the site will need some kind of overhaul, but this time with much more thought put into how exactly the site will be used and which features users will care about the most. I kinda like the channel idea, but the reason the channel feature works on YouTube is that it's perfect for video blogging and it allows users to easily follow specific users. I don't really see users on the Interguild going out of their way to follow specific users just because they make great levels or articles. And if they made great videos, they're more likely to subscribe to them on YouTube, anyway.

I envision the Interguild being more like a big forum. I'm not saying our homepage should be an ugly forum index, but if you think about it, every piece of content on this site is just another forum topic. The level database and video archives and other features are really just mechanisms for finding and displaying certain forum topics. And we even have that "community bar" on the top of every page, displaying who's online, and what the most recent topics are. If we think of the site as a forum, each section of the site could be different forum board, each with its own sub-forums and other features to help you find content.

Even though the Interguild is really just a heavily-customized version of the typical forum, it doesn't really feel like it is. I think the reason for that is that we've kinda been putting a "mask" over the community in order to make ourselves look more official. I think it'd be great if we could somehow come up with a website design that puts the community front and center. Perhaps the content that makes it to the front page is determined by something organic, such as how much karma it gets.



What do you think about all of this? Do you think the Interguild should become more of a general gaming community and less of a level database?

Also here are some ideas that were posted on our Steam group:

I think that the only reason people have been inactive recently is because the IO ended and school started so people have suddenly lost the time and interest needed to make levels. I think that after a while the website will return to normal.

The new Normal is Not Making Levels-Normal.

I realize that changing the Interguild as whole is prioritized higher than finding a HATPC replacement. But I think one of the things that kept us stuck on HATPC so long was we were the first group to really explore it-hardcore. Yeah, there are other games out there that probably have as much depth as HATPC, but they probably already have communities that have gutted every inch of it for innovation like HATPC. I think we just struck gold with it because it was hidden due to being on a kids site.

That was always my problem with more 1-dimensional games like Super Stacker 2 or Red Remover, I curiously search for levels on Google and find entire forums designated to create levels for it. Most Flash games with free level editors even come with forums to post your levels on. It's kind of daunting to do something new when there are +1000 levels already using ideas. I remember I thought I was the **** when I was making my 3rd cave I think and I discovered how to use the "object falling through floor" glitch, lo and behold I find it's a well established aspect in the HATPCverse (of course that concept still seems to weasel its way into pretty much all my levels).

Putting that on the table, a community revamp sounds much better. I'm all down for a site content overhaul. We could be the internet equivalent of a company that started off knitting socks and hit it big when they found out they could make good coffee. Or we could fade into obscurity. The whole gaming circle/reviewers thing is already kinda a core part of the internet, so I wouldn't really expect an increase in membership if we made the transition. Maybe preexisting members will be on more, but most people looking for services like you describe would probably just go straight to Youtube or another forum like the Interguild, but larger. The whole thing you said about us pretending to be official I completely agree with. I can't find the topic, but I remember Shos once suggesting giving the IG a Wikipedia page, and I said something like we're essentially a glorified Neopets guild.

Once again, I'm all for change. Evolution, man. There's a good chance I may not actively participate in the changes, like my participation (lack of) in Minecraft, but I'll definitely stick around to see them. I can't leave the Interguild now, the truth is I've invested too much time into this site to leave without probably becoming unstable, lol. Any free time I would gain would just be replaced with me doing some other activity involving sitting down and staring at a screen. Wow, that turned dark. GOOOOOOOO INTERGUILD!!!

So is Aeon officially cancelled? Does that mean we can finally channel all our efforts into the ICP?

I don't think that's the case, but you know, with Livio having very limited time to work on it and all, it's more likely to stay in an indefinite alpha than anything.

I'm taking it indefinite alpha is the nice way of saying Development Hell? (no offense)

What I mean is that we're probably not going to get more advanced Aeon versions than the ones we have seen so far. Livio knows best, but that's my guess.

I've actually used the term Development Hell to describe Aeon's development to my friends. There are tons of problems holding Aeon back, mainly the huge scope of the project, but also the fact that most of my work on it was done as I was still learning programming. I also spent too much time focusing on technical features and not enough on playability.

If Aeon's going to get made, I'm going to have to dedicate serious time to it, and work hard to keep that time from getting taken over by other projects and responsibilities. I'm getting really sick of having so many projects all the time, so I've been trying to drop some of them recently so that in a few months I'll have literally nothing left to do except work on the Interguild. Of course, I can't work on an Interguild revamp and Aeon at the same time, but the revamp is probably more important.

About time this showed up in the recent posts...

But what were you guys talking about with updating a level system or something?? The problem is admin inactivity. That's probably the #1 killer of communities. Look at IC.net last year; we went from 1,622 posts in July 2011 and 912 in August 2011 to 21 posts in November because of Haily's inactivity. I'm an "Ice Lord" on IC.net now and I try to post every few days and add new features once in a while and we're doing a lot better than last year. If the admin isn't around then people get the impression that the admin does not care and then they may leave or not bother contributing. Sure the user profiles have a bad design and level database reform 2010 is still a work in progress (probably not), but what you have right now works. People just aren't using it because the community is being neglected by Livio and the staff. Some featured content is over a year old, competitions take months to judge and I'd also mention lack of weekly updates but IC.net is guilty of that as well. The staff has probably lost motivation to do anything because of admin inactivity.

About Aeon, it would suck if it was abandoned but people have lost interest in it. There's been no development for almost 9 months. TNT probably made HatPC in a week or less. Reviving the community is more important than Aeon so you could put development on hiatus until IG has more activity and you have more time, Livio. I'd consider helping with Aeon development but I don't know AS. I know it's all object oriented and I learnt object oriented php last month and I'm learning java in AP computer science at school and that's all object oriented so maybe I'll have some idea of how AS works in the future. I wouldn't consider this at all though until next June after provincials though when I'd actually have the time.

But yeah, a revamp would bring a short burst of activity... until you would go inactive again. You already have the members and stuff but people just aren't posting because you aren't, Livio. After all, the admin is the role model.

Yeah, those are very good points. I've definitely noticed that things get more active when I come online as opposed to just lurking offline. If we've been putting a mask over the community then we've definitely done a bad job of making ourselves look active and interesting. I suppose this is why companies hire community managers, so that their entire job can be to cater to the community, to release updates on time, and find the best content to feature. The strange thing is that when managing my time, I've never seen that as very important work that needed to get done. I've always been focused on building things and fixing things, but I've never seriously made plans to write weekly updates or put up featured content or video archive images. If anything, those should be the real reasons why I should work harder to come online more often, not just so that I can go around the forums and be just another member.

Even if we could magically release Aeon tomorrow, I fear that it would have the same impact that the Fiddler trick had. Everyone was super excited at first, but it really didn't make that big of an impact because we were just plain sick of HATPC at that point. Aeon would have to feel like a completely different game for it to have any real effect. We'd have to find a way to recapture the same kind of depth that HATPC had.

Regarding the lack of weekly updates, I'm not really doing those anymore because:
1. Those required a decent amount of time to make, and now that I'm back in college, I don't have as much free time
2. Besides the mafia game and now this, there really hasn't been anything interesting going on, or at least not as much as there was during the summer.

While I wouldn't put it on Livio for being inactive, yes, Livio being online certainly does create more activity.

Anyways, as you may or may not have noticed, my name is absent from the staff forum conversation Livio quoted. I'd been reading it, but I don't have much to add. The fact that people are visibly getting tired of hatpc and the similarity of Aeon to hatpc is scary, and if we do go on with making it, we'll definitely need to make sure it will be different enough from hatpc that we won't lose interest within a few weeks. I think part of the problem is that people just aren't interested in playing levels anymore. I think early on we were very motivated to play other people's caves to see what crazy stuff they'd come up with. But here we are ???? years later and we've already seen it all, and as a result, good number of us aren't interested in playing hatpc levels anymore. Meanwhile, some of the other games we have are good, but just don't quite have the same following as hatpc did, and aren't quite as elaborate/interesting as hatpc was. As a result, they have less people interested in the game, and there's not as much to do with the game, so those who do pay attention don't find themselves making that many levels.

I'll also add that I think minecraft was a definitely a step in the right direction, mainly because it allows our members to easily collaborate on projects. I've never really been a huge fan of multiplayer stuff, but that aspect of minecraft is what gives it such a huge advantage over the other games. When you all collaborate together to make cities and stuff, everyone involved is going to see and appreciate the work that others are doing, and that gives additional incentive for people to build stuff or do whatever it is you guys do there, since they know their work is going to be seen and appreciated for what it is by others. You're not going to be as motivated to make an intricate building design if no one is going to see it. And I think that's also part of why we see less levels being made; because no one is appreciating them and if no one's going to bother playing them then what's the point? We still have a few faithful hatpc'ers left (probably mostly soccer) but of the last 19 levels submitted to the site, only 6 have been rated.

So where do I think we should go from here? If I knew the answer to that question, you'd have heard from me earlier.

I think we shouldn't get rid of the IG being a free flash game and HatPC and MC community, because that's the only reason the site has any members. I think we should just expand the IG to new heights!

nononononon no attmepts to make it a large community please.
They will just fail, and it will stay a small community with an ever decreasing amount of activity.

Hello Captain Killjoy, did Captain Oblivious make them transfer you?

Something I mentioned before, we could expand the IG to general level design. Not just a collection of levels for Flash games, but discussions and articles on the various aspects of level design and what makes a level good or not. We could even expand to general game design, but I don't think there is enough expertise here to do that.

Using games to be creative has definitely been a central theme in the interguild so far, so I think we should preserve that. I also think the level database shouldn't be melted down to part of a forum; it's probably one of the strongest parts of the site, in my opinion. Instead, it should probably be rebranded to something more general like 'User-made Content' or 'Creativity Zone' or something that emphasises that it's the place to go to see people's game-related creations.

I think there's pros and cons to both going general and staying niche. Five years ago, I mainly played Flash games and made levels etc, whereas I'm now more of a 'general' gamer who plays more mainstream games. I suspect that many of the other members here are the same as they've grown older and been able to afford paid games/want to spend their gaming time more wisely. So, from the perspective of the older members, it would be nice to have more of a focus on mainstream games and things like mods etc.

The downside to that though is that it would dilute the community to some extent. We're only a small group of people, so it's unlikely that we're going to be able to find people who play the same games as us on here besides special cases like Minecraft. It also alienates younger members who can't afford to, for example, buy Half-life 2 to play some mod/level someone has created.

I think the most important venture into 'general gaming' is for us to just play together as a community. Some of the posts on this thread have opened my eyes to the fact that we're more focused on building stuff than interacting with each other as a community. A community manager role would indeed be useful to promote the discussion and appreciation of the new creations being made by our members, organise online meet-ups, put up regular news posts etc.

Here's an idea to make those weekly updates a little easier and more effective; don't just write about what's gone on inside the interguild, but talk about cool new game-related stuff as well. Even if nothing has happened on the forums, the 'weekly update' guy could treat the weekly update as a blog post to the outside world. Let's face it: if a random person peeks in to our front window, a weekly update about the 'Neezles crisis' is hardly going to welcome them in. Talk about 'interesting game with level editor features X' or 'level design technique Y' or 'ideas for stuff we could do Z'. Anything to show on the front page that the interguild has some life in it. And this community manager doesn't have to be one person, it could be a shared role.

Going back to the idea of playing together, this was why I suggested Team Fortress 2 as it is free and enables us to communicate in real-time while playing a game. Even better, it gives us potential to bring in new members from the lobbies we play in.

I also feel that we shouldn't completely abandon our roots. I'd say we're currently a pretty good site for our niche (big database of user content plus a forum which is fairly active, something that a lot of sites don't have), but if we were to become a generic gaming site, we would be a pretty mediocre generic gaming site due to our lack of manpower. So if there's anything an overhaul should focus on, it should be that we like creating stuff with games. The site's tagline should probably be changed; currently, it doesn't bring to mind a place where I could show off the cool stuff I made. Maybe something like 'the place to share user-made game content'; preferably something better, I'm not good with names.

A note about Aeon; I can say with some confidence that if Aeon was to be completed and was as playable and functional as HATPC, I would make the occasional level for it. My main problem with HATPC right now is that, for what it's worth, I really can't be bothered to go through the uploading/testing process through Neopets. I've grown used to the convenience of more usable level-editing systems. If Aeon had the level editor inside the game and allowed me to test a level at the click of a button, I'd definitely make some use of it. Even more so if it had some extra features. So don't completely abandon the idea of Aeon.  

I agree with basically everything Jebby just said.

Today, I started a notebook to design a new Interguild website that would hopefully be more representative of this new direction. Unlike past layout redesigns, where I basically do all the work up front and then release it all at once, I'm going to approach this from a game design perspective and release several 'prototypes' of my ideas over the upcoming weeks. It's much easier to assess an idea when you can see it, rather than just talking about it, and websites especially need a lot of testing if they're going to be well-designed.

As for how much time I can devote to this, I just dropped one of my classes today, so maybe that'll give me more time. I sense that I might end up using that extra time to stay on top of some other projects I'm working on, but lately I've been finding myself working on the Interguild as my preferred method of procrastination, so who knows?

Right now I'm working on coming up with a more cohesive structure to organize the site and all of its different sections. We do need some kind of content creation/sharing system or 'Creativity Zone', but it's hard to figure out how exactly it should be like.

I've started reading a couple community management books that will hopefully give me a few ideas on how to improve these designs:
http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/usability/0735710759
http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-design-and-development/9780814412930

I've also learned a lot about web development and security in the past year. The new site will likely include nice javascript features and much better coding overall. Yesterday I started experimenting with object-oriented PHP, which will make the maintenance of the site a lot easier.

Progress Report

I spent the first chunk of today setting up my workspace. I'm mostly working on a local development server, which saves me a significant amount of time in that I can test things instantaneously without having to upload things to the Interguild. This is also just useful for maintaining the site later. If there's a glitch, I'll be able to test it on my computer and not have to resort to live testing.

I then set up http://revamp.interguild.org in order to test how time consuming it would be to get things ready for testing on the Interguild, and it's pretty annoying, mostly because many of my PHP scripts will be referencing paths from the server's root (because these scripts are run in a variety of places), and my local server has a different directory structure from the Interguild's (by the way, the server's root directory is not the same thing as the website's root directory).

Next, I spent some time thinking about the structure of the site, and how we're going to organize things this time (more on that later). I then started designing the visuals of the site, and here's what I have so far:

http://revamp.interguild.org/preview1.png

I decided not to depart too much from the current design, partly because I'm lazy, but also because we're so used to it and it works pretty well, in my opinion. One of my goals with this new design is to make things feel less cramped and rigid, so I'm going to be adding more breathing room, larger text, and rounded corners. I'm also considering adding a sidebar of some sorts, because having everything stretched out so far really hurts readability, and it can be just plain ugly sometimes.

I'll likely play around with the background colors more once I get to how the main content will look like, but so far I like how it makes the place feel brighter and perhaps livelier. I'm not very sure about that logo design, however. I kinda like the sound of "The Interguild Gaming Community" because it sounds like a phrase. If you were to take out the "the", then you'll just read it as "Interguild: Gaming community". I dunno. What do you think?

By the way, that gray box next to the logo is for an ad, if you haven't figured it out. I considered putting a larger ad up there (which would be the same as the ad on the bottom of this page), but that would squeeze the logo into the corner and things would just look more ugly.

The new categories on the top bar are based off of my current idea for the new structure of the site. I want the different categories of the site to have more unity between them. The high-level idea behind my approach is that this is a forum where you can post different pieces of game-related content, and all of that content gets split into these categories: Levels, Videos, Articles, Regular Forum Topics, and Other (I think More looks cooler on the top bar than Other). Right now I imagine Other consisting of comics, stories, mods, and original games. This would leave the Articles section to actually be more about articles, guides, essays, etc.

Speaking of the Article section, I'm considering either reposting or perhaps moving my blog entirely to this site. If I do that, the hope will be that I might be able to set a good example for the section, or at least I could increase its use and credibility. It might also encourage me design-wise to create an article system that I would be really happy to use, because I'm very picky when it comes to how my articles look.

Instead of comps, we're going to have an Events section, which will allow us to include things like the Mafia games, online-game meetups, or competitive tournaments, in addition to the usual level/video creation competitions. Also, instead of a massive ever-growing games list somewhere on the site, I'm hoping to do something similar to Steam or Good Old Games, where you can just search for the game and immediately find it thanks to search suggestions.

YYYYYYYYEEEEEEESSSSSSS!!!!!!!!

The Interguild can be revamped into a lolcat forum for all I care, round corners are WIN!

Also, I'm really surprised by how good we look in the "general gaming community" role. Many gamers might make a connection between the term inter-guild and MMO guilds, signifying a really large, or wide-encompassing gamer community. Also, I didn't find this out until today, but the font that we use for our logo is based on the really old Intellivision video game console: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision

You can definitely use CSS to make a sidebar that follows you as you scroll down. Also, it would be great if you could make the site mobile friendly. It's best to start this early. Also, you'll want to do search engine optimizing so that we can actually be found on popular search engines. I can definitely help with the CSS and html if you want.
EDIT:
I also think that the channel idea could work. I've always wanted to do video let's plays since I discovered them, and I like writing, so it would be interesting to be able to put all that stuff in one place. Since the community is largely based on creativity in games, it might not be that big of a leap to say general creativity with an emphasis on gaming. That way things like concept art, sound effects, music, plots, and levels would all have a place here. We'd essentially be a general game resource community. Then, for people who arn't interesting in making a game per se, there'd still be a place for levels, walkthrough videos, and of course the general forum. I think that giving the chat box a bigger role would help as well. Right now, it's easy to ignore it entirely. It would also be nice if it didn't need refreshing...
Our tagline: The Creative Gamer's Workspace
or maybe: The Gamer's Gallery

I never heard about that CSS trick. Maybe I'll look into it.

And yes, we definitely need a mobile site. The mobile site is actually one of the first things you should think about when designing a site, because there's only a limited amount of space and content that you can fit on your site, and that helps you prioritize the parts of your site that are really important. I'm going to make the site naturally turn into a mobile site when the window is shrunken into smaller resolutions, which is why I started designing the desktop appearance first, at least for now.

SEO is another big thing I've been worrying about. Right now I'm focusing more on making sure I actually use valid HTML, and that I structure it in a way that helps bots find the real content. I also need to make the social media buttons more prominent, as well as make sure to keep our Facebook page maintained.

I'm not sure about the resource idea, mainly because I don't see us having many members who would be interested in that. The community is too much on the gamer side and not enough on the game development side at this point.

As for taglines, I can never think of a tagline that explicitly states what we're like without sounding lame somehow. Lately, I've been more interested in figuring out how to say that using every aspect of the site's design, rather than using text.

Hey the navigation looks a lot better now at the top. Something looks strange above that. Maybe it's the ad box. About the php directories, there is a way in php to grab the current directory the file is running in with dirname(__FILE__) or you can get the public_html directory path with $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].

Does the blog section really have to be changed back to articles? Do you plan on presenting these articles/blogs in a different way or something? You could just keep it as blogs, scrap the weird list thing and add tags instead with the cool thing where most common tags appear in a larger font and stuff. And then make sure there's a WYSIWYG editor. (These don't seem to work very well on mobile devices but who writes a blog on a mobile device??)

Oh yeah the logo with the "Gaming Community" sounds kinda bland. I don't know what would be better though. But mafiascum doesn't use "Mafia Community" and instead uses "a mob has formed..." so maybe something else? A few other forums... topadmin uses "for blog and forum admins," buildpcs uses "the power is yours," so maybe something like "for level creators"?? There's also the option of just not having a tagline.

Oh yeah moving your blog to this site could encourage others to do that as well. You should also have a way to promote certain blogs to the homepage.

Cool. And also, livio you're not going to make a separate mobile site, but will instead just have separate css files, right? RIGHT???