TL;DR New moderator, so please do report any problematic posts or comments. What sort of content would you like to see here? Post-mortems? AMAs? And a reminder that we allow self-promo here but only if it adds value from a gamedev perspective.

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Hi all! You might have seen my name around in the community. I’ve been here since before the Reddit blackouts, which I guess makes me some kind of ancient lemming-witch, and spent the last few weeks trying to kick off discussion threads and shilling our community at every opportunity which is probably how some of you made your way here in the first place.

I’ve recently been appointed as community mod by an instance admin (thank you Ada <3), due to our lead (and only other) mod currently being inactive.

Firstly, please know this isn’t a grab for power, it just makes sense to have someone able to deal with reports and enforce the existing rules already put in place by our lead mod until they hopefully return. I’ll do my best to steer the ship until that happens, but would love to get your feedback on direction.

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As we’re a relatively new community on a relatively new site, obviously we don’t have a huge amount of valuable content here. YET. I’ve been chatting to some friends on other platforms about potentially making long form, in-depth posts here about their experiences to serve as interesting, educational reads as well as pillar content for the community.

Gamers with specific accessibility requirements, senior AAA developers, solo indie devs who have successfully acquired project funding or navigated their way through Next Fest, employers who can talk about how to get hired, that sort of thing.

We could potentially even go in the direction of AMA style threads rather than essays and make an event out of it, if that’s something the community would be more interested in?

Any suggestions for the sort of thing you’d like to see are very welcome, and I’ll do what I can to make it happen! Personally I’m coming at the gamedev topic from the perspective of a hobbyist solo developer, but I know we have a diverse group here who will most likely want to see different things, so this is your chance to be heard.

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Lastly I just wanted to touch on the existing rule around self-promo, as I know many people are using mobile apps that don’t show the sidebar info and may be unaware.

Self-promotion is WELCOME in this community. But with a caveat: it must come with added value for our members. I’ll quote the sidebar here, written by our glorious leader:

Self-promotion is fine as long as you do it from a gamedev perspective - share your progress, insights, techniques and mishaps! If you recently posted, update the previous post instead of filling the frontpage with your project

So you want to drop a link to your devlog? Sure! Do it as part of a post discussing the stuff you learned recently during the development process and how we can avoid making the same mistakes you did.

Looking for trailer feedback? Sure! Tell us all about the research you’ve done so far and how you used what you learned to structure what you’re showing us. What do you think worked and what didn’t?

Want an excuse to give us your Steam wishlist link? Sure! But do it as part of a post-mortem post of some kind, a brief guide on how you approached making an unusual mechanic, or even a meta-discussion on what you’ve learned about encouraging more wishlists…

…you get the idea.

If promo posts start to significantly overshadow more discussion-focused posts we may eventually revisit this rule, but as a probably temporary guardian of the space it would be weird of me to come in and immediately make changes like that, so here we are.

Thanks for reading my wall of text and I hope you all have a great day!