#this is even worse than the discord font update a while | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nefola-real · 1 year

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the name change discord thing

big ole post i made for their support forum, might was well also post it here. tldr expression on the internet is dying, and i am complaining in hopes to slow it down in one specific area Today the discord blog and in app update notifications discord announced a change to how user names work. This change will cause a number of negative effects. Most for users, but a handful for discord itself. I am going to go over each subtidal thing in the blog post in order. This is kinda an open letter to discord, thus the use of YOU.

"The biggest problem: our current usernames can often be too complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily."

This statement and its supporting details are wrong in a number of ways. hear is an address of the post's subpoints about this

Remembering the discriminator isn't the biggest deal. Its a bit of a paint at times, but remembering less than half a phone number is not hard.

Case sensitivity is an issue, however most users with weird name casing will tell you their weird casing.

Common name usage will be a problem under your new system as well, and will likely be worse. this is an inherent flaw of usernames. your current system almost fixes this issue even. this point does not make sense.

People who change their name a lot live with this. Your new system prevents any changes at all. You are making the supposed problem worse here.

Ok special characters are an issue. This is the only thing that you would be improving. However the extent that you propose limiting special character usage is a bit much.

Most people call it your tag or end numbers. Not knowing the technical name isn't a problem here.

Half of all requests failing is an issue, just not one warranting a redesign of a core feature.

"But we realized that then we would have an even more complex system with both a Display Name and a username that still included the four-digit discriminator."

This is the core issue with your approach. The problem is characters users can't type (easily) in user names. You are trying to address this and the obtuse process of verbally communicating letter case. Discord has elected to solve a problem that was minor and a problem many users don't have. This means that the solution will cause issues. We now get to the main bad argument you make here, the section title. Discord profiles are already very complicated. Simplifying them means removing entrenched features. Four digits and an ampersand at the end of a user name is the smallest thing you could have done to simplify discord profiles. Bios and custom statuses are relatively redundant and both take up more profile space. Notes are about as entrenched as the current username system and removing them would also simplify your profiles. Discord is already a complex and over featured software; and that is a good thing. You were able to spring into an established software market because of this. Doing everything other messengers do, but better and also a something nobody else does is why I and other users switch to discord. Removing complexity goes against why discord initially succeeded. In the past you have streamlined advanced features rather than removed them, which prevents new users from being overwhelmed and lets old users keep their toys. Rate limits and complexity are not worth the damage your solution will cause.

"How We’re Improving Usernames on Discord"

Ok so your actual solution isn't the worst. Separate display and user names is fine. Its clunky but it is fine. The changes to user names is where the issue lies. Usernames are now alphanumeric plus period and underscore. This is the core issue. While you did remove font special characters and emoji overuse you went overkill. Spaces are inoffensive, same with other standard keyboard special characters. Verbalizing usernames is not an issue most people care about. People who care make their usernames easy to verbalize. The fact that you are implementing unique usernames this late into your software's lifespan is the biggest problem for you.

"we will be assigning priority to choose your new username based on when you registered for Discord."

The user name gold rush this late into a platform is a problem. My account is old; I will probably be able to snipe my username during the rollout. My current username will turn into my new one. I suspect most users with accounts from 2018 and on will run into issues getting the exact user name they want. Outside of people who's users have had special characters for years, newer users are likely to encounter someone else who wanted their special username. This will cause feel bads. Where the solution is to get someone else you hardly know to give up a user name.

Next up is that all the names of prominent figures are going to get snipped. Malicious actors are going to take ever @discord, @twitter, @ninja, and @mod they can.

You are going to upset most ordinary users who made accounts in the second half of your program's life, many streamers, and maybe a brand or two. A random roll out wont solve it either, you will still have streamers and brands getting snipped.

Just stick with the old system and ban special fonts. This wasn't a problem and your solution will make it worse.

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quietdaysco · 5 years

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The Process: Research

Ever wanted to make something, but didn’t know where to start? We too. In this second installment of The Process, we’ve finished forming our idea and now it’s time to inform it.

2. Research

Mind you, this isn’t a “step two” per se. Here’s the big kicker on what we soon discovered about this part of development:

Research is an active, ongoing process, whose goals change throughout pre- to post-production.

We may have created the idea of Primrose Path but our research didn’t stop at the end of pre-production, as if to say we’ve got everything we need and now it’s time to dive into making it. During production, we still had questions. Research is the only reason that, if you stopped us on the side of the street, the topics of future biomaterials and methods, dynamic UI design, and historic architectural eras could all pop up in the same conversation.

And all of that is valuable information to us, because researching is relevant in every area of the process! But what kind of information did we look for?

Our five categories are Community Canvassing, Story & Character Development, Team Management, Game Design, and Marketing.

Let’s break it down:

A. Community Canvassing

Identifying and learning our target audience.

Identify personal wants from our game.

We have to stop and think: what kind of game do we want to play? If you want something, chances are, there’s a group of people out there who want the same thing. They are our audience.

Identify the type of media and genres relevant to our game.

Our video game is a visual novel, and its market genres are predominantly adult, drama, and romance. Because the medium of visual novels originated and is popular in Japan, we use the term otome (Japanese for “maiden” or “girl”) or otoge (portmanteau of “otome” and “game”) in our genre list. So, our game is an adult, drama, romance, otome—or focused on a female main character who deals with a cast of potential male partners.

Case any census data and statistics on target and related communities’ research blogs.

This one was important to us because we like considering quantifiable data that gives us the bigger picture. Statistics blogs and databases helped us get a clearer view of different demographic subsets of the visual novel community. It’s also important that we read material about sister media like the general interactive fiction community, as both deal with reader input and resultant story-branching.

Inquire fans in those genres for game recommendations and any opinions.

Community hubs are a click away. We connected with others via forums like Reddit and instant messenger servers like Discord that specifically revolve around fans and game developers of the visual novel medium.

Read game reviews in those genres by other fans and critics.

The most interesting thing for us when we read these reviews is not so much what someone did or didn’t like, but what aspects of the game they focused on, and what other topics they decided to connect to their original answer. You may be surprised how people decide to expand on their answer and where tangents lead, which is very telling, valuable associations.

Connect with other developers for support and networking.

The Western visual novel community is a small community, but commercial success is not confined to said community. Building a rapport with other hardworking devs is important, as it follows us in such a small space—for better or worse. There’s a lot to learn from the wider indie development community, too.

B. Story & Character Development

Creating an organic experience.

Real-world parallels to inspire for or reference in game direction.

Whether we take a trip to the city with a camera and sketchbook, rent and buy books from libraries and bookstores, or visit Google Maps in satellite view, we are pulling up everything we need to inform our game’s locations, people, and events.

Observe and converse with people.

The behaviors, quirks, appearances, opinions, and feelings of people are abundant, and it’s not until we observe and sometimes familiarize ourselves with others that we catch some of the concerted expressions that create a nuanced individual.

Interacting with others is first-hand experience, and listening to or reading others’ experiences is second-hand. If we can't write from first or second-hand experience, we must inform ourselves with other sources, as it’s crucial in writing characters with whom we may not directly or easily identify. We often defer to interviews and documentaries to start.

Psychology and sociology research.

Sometimes reading from experts about general trends and triggers of the human condition makes it easier for us to understand, verify, and better portray things like addictions, behavioral disorders and mental illnesses, fetishes, and cultural stigmas for our character development and world-building. Though this isn’t limited to negative or abnormal things we cannot identify. It can also be in what ways the values of a person or society evolve, or how players interact with video game avatars!

Read and deconstruct critically-acclaimed novels in our genres

It’s understood that if people want to become better writers, they have to become better readers. Being able to settle down with some traditionally-published, well-received books relevant to our interests will help us build on our knowledge of suitable writing conventions, as well as analyzing broader narrative elements, like plot pacing. We even have a list of writing resources saved to help us break it all down!

C. Team Management

Standardizing ways to increase workflow efficiency.

Pipeline development.

Know a general end-date to keep in mind for the finished product. Setting a scope for our project and a timeline for production challenges us to keep on task as we work towards that date. We’ve set ours up by month and refer to that document for phase estimation.

Time management, task delegation, task tracking, and work logs.

Whether your team is me, myself, and I, or made of employees and contractors, it’s important to stay synchronized and keep record of that progress. Quiet Days has our own GitScrum board to help us with assigning tasks, timing how long a task takes us versus the amount of time we expected it to take, and streamlining the process from start to finish. It also keeps track of percentage of overall project completion and key performance indicators (KIP), or the metrics of a user’s personal contribution and work ethic over a period of time. There are a plethora of other task management sites and apps available to use too.

Style guides to standardize writing and art.

Between the two of us at Quiet Days, we both work on the 2D art and writing, and we both default to different visual and writing styles. So, we’ve set up and continue to add to our respective guides, keeping the art style and narration and character portrayals consistent. This is especially helpful should we take up other artists or writers, so that they can easily assimilate into our workflow.

Account delegation for social media and company correspondence.

Understanding who does what for cohesion under a company brand is important for its image. We share all accounts under the company name, so technically both of us have access, which works well for our team of two. It’s early, but so far “delegation” seems to have taken on a natural division between Coda and Elm—the former taking to micro-blogging, and the latter to streaming and forum correspondence. While this dynamic may change in the future, we both refer back to each other under the Quiet Days brand.

Potential for contracting help.

We’ve considered that there may be a time in production where a helping hand is needed. Additional considerations like the freelancing market and pricing are kept in mind for the future.

D. Game design

Scrutinizing game elements from a developer’s lens.

Consider for which platform to design.

PC? Mobile? Console? Cross-platform? While we are primarily designing our game to be played on PC, should we want to capitalize on popular handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch, for example, things like game engines and builds, game optimization, resolution, encryption, touch capabilities, and content guidelines for their private company platform all need to be considered. These things change between platforms.

Consider designing globally.

There are people different from us who would like to enjoy our game too. We consider the user experience (UX) for things like the possibility of game translations and using fonts types that read well for different language characters like Chinese or Russian. We also consider how to customize the experience to accommodate for players with different cognitive abilities, which falls under accessibility features.

Play what’s commercially un/successful and community-recommended.

We can learn a lot from both good and bad game design, and what the community mostly consumes. We engage with these games and take notes on graphics, accessibility features, user interface (UI) designs, game mechanics, soundtracks, and overall presentation and aesthetic. What did we like and what would we have preferred?

Stay updated on game design development tips from industry heads

There are people who have been doing it much longer than we have, and a number of them are setting industry standards. We can learn a thing or two in how they handle a problem and find solutions.

E. Marketing

Methods for optimizing outreach and return of investment.

Social media strategies for engaging and involving our audience.

We’ve laid the groundwork for character accounts on social media to launch as a way for our audience to interact with characters from our game. While role-playing is a fun marketing and meta world-building device, we’re exploring other cool avenues like exploitable images and audience challenges to drum up future participation.

Types of advertising and promotional materials.

There may come a time when word-of-mouth may not be enough. Would we consider purchasing ad space on different sites for greater visibility, or spend money on “promoting” features on social media? Would we commission or create and sell promotional merchandising for our audience?

Crowdfunding platforms and prospects.

Popular ones like Patreon, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo all have their draws and their drawbacks for creators and supporters alike. For what expenses would we crowdfund? What additional rewards would we provide for the financial support, if any? Do we want financial support for our project, or continual financial support as a company creating content? Some developers don’t actually use these platforms to request funding, but as another way of advertising their game. Would we do that?

Cross-exposure with other devs.

Interviews, public events, and collaborations with other game developers is a win-win situation with everyone involved. We want to be able to not just network, but allow each other to introduce our products and skills to a greater audience, creating and sharing a unique, dedicated fanbase in the overlap.

The Takeaway

At the time of this post, we’re still in the production phase, so some of this information isn’t applicable right now, but no knowledge is wasted: these things will always be handy to know and consider for later. We’re making our decisions in lieu of—and even despite some of—our research, in order to create a game that we’ll love and hope others will too. It’s important that as a game developer, you too keep yourself informed!

Speaking of ongoing research, Western otome is a largely indie market with many small, tenacious teams and hardly any corporate studios. If you are a Western otome developer, please contact us! We’d love to interview you in a Q&A, get your input on your process, and feature your story on our blog!

#devjournal #gamedev #game development #indie otome #indie game #theprocess #process #visual novel #journal #otome #otome game #diary #indiedev #personal #team management #story development #character development

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