IntroductionI’ve been a member of this community for more than 5 years at this point, and I first discovered MFGG 7 years ago. That’s a very long time, even though there are a lot of people who have been around much longer than me. And in this 5 years, I slowly watched MFGG evolve, and eventually go downhill and struggle, while the staff couldn’t manage to do much about it. Okay, first of all, MFGG is one of the first communities I've ever joined. I've made a lot of friends during the time I spent here, and I owe a lot to this site for not only letting me realize my passion for game development but also for the fun times I've had. So yeah, MFGG means a lot to me, which is why I’m writing this. I simply don’t want to see a site that’s so important to me to die while there are things we can do to Make MFGG Great Again. I might be a bit harsh and criticize the staff, but I still love most of them. And as you guys know, I’m from Turkey, and I’ve never written anything this long in my life, even in my native language. I rushed this a bit as well since it's boring to write stuff lol, so I’m sorry for the bad grammar, repetitiveness, and whatnot. Criticizing the Staff and Communication IssuesA while ago, there was some drama in Hotel Delfino. Basically, Mit gave the idea of making an official MFGG Discord, but Vinny stated that he didn't like the idea, so Mit, others and I tried to prove the staff that it was a good idea by creating a testing one for discussing stuff and testing the channel layout and such. But apparently, Cruise also made one before, one that wasn't meant for anyone else to be seen. But then, rest of the staff turned it into a testing Discord while being fully aware of Mit's one. This ended up offending some of the members (mainly Mit, some of the -w folk and I) and making them think that the staff doesn't really trust the members and listen to them. Not only that but also none of the staff could tell us when Cruise made the server or with what purpose, resulting in everyone being really confused. This is really similar to what happened with the whole The Lockening incident. People criticized the staff for their decisions, and the staff responded with just locking those topics, without giving a proper explanation, and this made people mad. Heck, even some of the staff members simply ran away. The chaos ended when Cruise decided to explain that they were indeed listening to the criticism. That was it, after that everyone calmed down. The problem with both incidents is that the staff is simply unable to communicate well with the members, especially when things get tense. Like how the staff couldn’t figure out to tell the members that they were indeed listening to the criticism? How couldn’t they realize that continuing doing something that angers the members wouldn’t make them shut up? (in this case, locking topics for no apparent reasons) Or how they couldn’t realize that doing stuff behind the members wouldn’t make them feel ignored? These should be obvious. What should be done then? Well, in my opinion, the staff should be more open to the members and hide less stuff from them. Right now, it seems like every decision is being done behind closed doors. The Discord server was suggested in the suggestion forums, then we got a reply from Vinny about him being skeptical, and that’s it. Days passed after that, and the staff was dead silent about it. So, it was safe to assume that there wasn’t anything done by it, that’s why Mit opened his testing server, which caused the problems I mentioned above. If the staff discussed this in that suggestion topic, rather than a hidden forum, none of this would happen. Since the staff discussed that in public we would know that something was being done about it. And if Cruse posted that testing server structure in public we wouldn’t try to make our own. Of course, I’m not saying that everything should be discussed in public, I’m obviously aware that this can’t be done with everything, like member warnings and stuff like that. But in my opinion, if the staff is talking about something that deals with most of the members, then the members should have the right to hear it too, especially if that’s something they would want to hear. But this doesn’t mean the staff shouldn’t learn how to handle tense situations, running away when things get chaotic is still unacceptable, even if they decide to be more open about staff discussion. That’s not the only thing we can do to increase the communication between the staff and the members. I think it would be great if mods always stated a reason when they locked a topic because I remember that being a huge issue during The Lockening. Deleting threads should also be avoided too, as that leaves a lot of confusion. Just edit and remove the contents of the main post and lock the topic, unless it’s a spambot or something. Same for removing individual posts, just remove the content of it and give a reason why the post got removed, except for the spambots, again. I also think that having a monthly banlist again would be neat. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, can we talk about Nite Shadow being promoted to be a moderator and then admin silently, hidden from everyone? If it wasn’t for Q-Nova most of us wouldn’t be aware of it, and you know that Q-Nova is super good at noticing things. If I remember correctly this was one of the reasons why that drama with Nite Shadow happened. And speaking of staff promotions, I’m also kinda confused about how the staff are being chosen. I mean don’t get me wrong, I think sending applications is a great idea, but it really doesn’t feel like the staff members are chosen based on them. What I noticed is that the staff members are (most of the times) being chosen solely based on how close they are to the current staff members and how nice they seem to be. It really doesn’t look like the staff considers all factors, factors such as how much they will fit the job based on their past experiences or how much of a positive (and negative) impact they will have on the site. This is probably the main reason why the staff really doesn’t want to make Mit a staff member as he tends to disagree with them a lot and get involved in a lot with arguments, even though he proved himself to be good at moderating, at least better than most current moderators, with Hotel Delfino. He also seems to be the only one who wants to make big changes to the site (other than me). I’m aware that the things aren’t that simple, and I know that there are other reasons why the staff wouldn’t want to promote him, but still. By the way, I’m not saying that the staff members are terrible at their jobs, or something like that. I’m only criticizing the staff for their poor decisions, so they can realize their mistakes and the same stuff won’t happen again in the future. No bad intentions here. “Quality” ControlAt this point, I’m pretty sure Quality Control team does not exist and is just a hoax, just like World 5 Castle. Joking aside, there are several terrible submissions on the main site and this puzzles me as every submission needs more than 1 vote to get accepted. I will just post links to some of the terrible submissions from 2017 and 2016 that wouldn’t get accepted if QC team actually looked at them. And they took me less then 10 minutes to find lol The staff also seemed to forget the actual purpose of sprites section of the main site. It is NOT a sprite showcase, nor an archive. It’s simply a bunch of resources for fangame creators. Yet we are seeing a lot of sprite sheets that have no use in fangames get accepted. This includes conversion of old Clickteam libs that are terrible by today’s standards or mediocre sprites in weird styles. Granted, this is far from the biggest problem of the site, but I felt like I had to address it since no one really talks about it. DMCAMFGG is… uhhh… not doing well compared to other sites such as SMWC and SFGHQ, and there are several reasons behind this. The most obvious one is Nintendo and them shutting down fangames. They obviously don’t shut down all fangames. If that was the case, they would shut down MFGG as well. But people are not aware of this fact. Rightfully so, the media tends to cover very popular fangames, or the ones that get shut down, because that’s where the clicks at. And the popular fangames tend to be the ones Nintendo likes to shut down most. Don’t believe me? Well 90% of the feedback my fangame gets is related to DMCA or C&D in some form. Quote: how many time before Big N comes and take this down ? Quote: Too bad this is not gonna make it like the games killed by nintendo Quote: y'all really out here expecting nintendo not to protect its copyright despite being legally required to do so? These are the most recent 3 comments I got about the game at the time I wrote this part. It has come to a point where I’m actually getting stressed about it since people only talk about it and not the game itself. And Flashback is much much more popular outside MFGG, as only 2 people from MFGG commented on the last demo, while I got like a hundred of them on Discord, Twitter etc. So what kind of fangames they shut down? Well there are 3 types of those games: - Remakes: AM2R, Super Mario 64 HD, Super Mario Remaker, Zelda Maker, Zelda 30th Year Tribute, Full Screen Mario
- Fangames that make profit: All the fangames in Game Jolt as it’s possible to make profit there.
- Pokemon fangames: Pokemon Uranium, PokeNet
Only fangame they took down that doesn’t fit these categories is No Mario’s Sky. They probably didn’t Mario to get accosiated with No Man’s Sky and played it safe, so yeah. Some of these fangames weren’t taken down by Nintendo too, but by creators themselves or by bots in Mediafire. This video explains the deal with Mediafire and Jason Allen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_gnwn535eMAnd the saddest thing is that even though this has been going on for over a year by now, MFGG staff is doing absolutely nothing about it! They pretty much watched all of this to happen from a distance. So, what’s the solution then? Informing the people of course! Let them know that there’s no risk of making fangames as long as you follow the guidelines. Put this information to the somewhere visible in the main site, as a page or something. Use the social media accounts to promote that page too so more people can learn about it. Just do something about it! The Difficulty of Fangame CreationHowever, MFGG’s downfall didn’t start with Nintendo deciding to be aggressive towards fangames. It only made things worse. It all started with MFGG failing at keeping up with the times. See, people aren’t really interested in small minigames anymore. People want to see bigger, more ambitious and flashier fangames. As a result, those who want to make fangames want to make those kind of fangames too, instead of smaller minigames or stuff like that. But that ends up with people either giving up or starting to make fangames that are way too ambitious for them. I’ve seen several examples of this, I’ve warned several people who wanted to start making fangames with something as big as Flashback, and by telling them to start smaller I either got ignored or killed all of their motivation. Minigame competitions are also a good example of this trend, because no one joins them anymore. Everyone is working on a big project, or wanting to work on a big project. It’s like this for Mario fangames, but when you look at Sonic, things are a bit different. All fangames in Sonic fangaming community are also equally ambitious, yet they do get new members who actually make fangames. Look at SAGE 2017, a lot of people will say it sucked because the games weren’t good. Why? Because most of them were made by beginners. In contrast we hardly get anyone new who’s interested in making fangames these days. And to fix that I think we can get some help from premade engines. I know, I know, a lot of you guys are prejudged towards engines, but they can be incredibly helpful for our community. Like, simply don't want to spend 3 years to make a fangame, and with engines they don’t really have to waste time by reinventing the wheel. If we had an MFGG Engine that has the essentials needed to make a fangame, we would get a lot more people to make games. And I’m not talking about something bloated, it would only have the basics. It would have the physics, collisions, a basic moveset, some blocks, some items, simple enemies, and ultra-customizable parents for easy enemy, block and other object creation. So, it would be simple enough to prevent clones. This is exactly what Sonic fangaming community did. They made Sonic Worlds, which got the Sonic’s physics etc. perfectly, and a lot of fangames used it. It doesn’t have a full main menu, tilesets, or a lot of example levels, it’s pretty simple. It’s not perfect however, it has some unnecessary stuff which leaded to a lot of fangames using them just because they are there, but it’s nowhere as bad as Hello Engine’s useless shite. A lot of great and unique fangames were based on premade engines. Power Star Frenzy, Super Mario Dimensions, Super Mario Dimensions 2, Super Mario Bros. Odyssey, Revenge of the Walrus, Luigi's Quest for Nothing, A Typical Mario Game etc. So, if you’re going to say something like: “All you can make with premade engines are fangame clones. I want to see more unique and wacky fangames, not recreations of official games!” please don’t. Oh yeah, we can have some tutorials too I guess, but YouTube is full of them, so I don't think they are that necessary. I’m pretty sure some of you are also moaning like grumpy old man, saying stuff like “I miss the old days of fangames when you made simple fangames just for fun!” or something similar. I can’t blame you, because I kinda agree, but that’s not what people are interested anymore. Remember, MFGG is failing because it’s still stuck at 2011’s. It’s time to move on. Shifting the FocusWhile not having a lot of fangames is one of MFGG’s problems, the biggest one is the lack of new members. For the last 2 years or so we’ve been struggling with getting new members, and making engines would simply encourage those who already visit MFGG to make fangames. We have to do much more than that. We have to shift MFGG’s focus. There were some suggestions for this before, like expanding into other forms of fan creations, such as fan art, ROM hacks, etc., and focusing more on general fan content rather than only fangames. It was discussed here, but I don’t think this would be a really smart move. First of all, pulling off something like this would be very difficult. We would need to restructure the entire site and make the artists interested in MFGG again. And after that, we would get a bunch of members that aren’t too into Mario fangames. The last time we had a lot of members that aren’t interested in fangames the forums split into two. And sure, this would fix the member shortage in the short run, but not the lack of fangames. And yeah, we can make some of them interested in fangames, but this whole thing is simply not worth the effort and risks in my opinion. Another similar suggestion I remember is expanding into and focusing on Nintendo fangames, rather than just Mario. I think I was the first one to make this suggestion, waaaaay back during the Skype days. This is also not a good idea for similar reasons, and it most certainly doesn’t solve our new member shortage. And here’s my Epic™ suggestion that will solve both problems at once in the most efficient way. Focusing on the players. Most people come to MFGG to play fangames, and let’s say we are also one of them. We open the home page, and what do we see? Staff members trying to be funny and a big list of newly added sprites. To be able to find some games we need to scroll down a bit to find updates with games. At the time of me writing this, the first game I see is “Yoshi’s Clicker DEMO”. It has no scores, the very first comment is: my real irl mom wrote: It won't run on my PC but I'm sure its absolutely great! And the second comment is someone giving the creator advice. The screenshot doesn’t tell much about the game, and the description isn’t very clear. So, we download the game, and it’s the basic tutorial in GM8, with some graphics replaced a terrible MIDI music playing. I’m not making this up, this is an incredibly bad first impression. The second game is “Made In MFGG - Wario's Mouse Training DEMO”. The screenshot and the description are even less clear this time, but the comments are pretty positive. Aaand it’s an okay WarioWare clone. Opening the games list doesn’t help either as a lot of the games are missing scores and some of those scores are very misleading. Like, there’s a 10/10 review for “9-Volt vs. 18-Volt”, but the actual game is pretty terrible. I hope you guys see my problem here, it’s simply too hard to find good games. And in my opinion, the only way to fix this issue is redesigning some of the main site in a player friendly way. First, let’s get rid of the updates. That page might be good for very frequent visitors, but it’s terrible for those who just visit MFGG to play games. Instead, have a proper main page that shows the stuff players want to see. Like first have a section that shows “Staff Picks”, “GOTM Winners”, or just good games that are released somewhat recently, then have a section with the highest rated games ever or something, and lastly just have a list of a list of latest games, sprites and other types of submissions. We don’t have to have the sprites as the main focus since those who are interested in them will open the sprites page anyways. If you guys don’t want to add the best games ever to the main page that can be its own page too, like a “Hall of Fame” or something. But the updates page definitely has to be gone, and there must be an easy way to find the best fangames. Also, can’t we allow everyone to rate the games simply by commenting? A lot of people don’t bother to review games, so there are a lot of games without scores. This would fix that problem, and people would have a basic idea about the quality of a certain game. We can add a recommendation system like Steam for the reviews too, or idk. But you might be saying “But MFGG isn’t a site for playing fangames, it’s a site for making fangames!”. And you’re right, but we can’t keep MFGG like this anymore. We are failing to get some fresh blood, and making the site friendlier for those who just want to play fangames is the best way to do that. That’s how SFGHQ built most of its current community, people visited SAGE to play fangames, joined SFGHQ’s Discord to discuss those fangames, and eventually started to make their own fangames. And as I mentioned before, a lot of the games in SAGE 2017 were made by beginners, and these beginners discovered SFGHQ from SAGE 2016. So yeah, that’s my suggestion. If we do this we will most certainly get new forum users who want to just discuss fangames, and they will eventually start making fangames too, seeing how it’s safe and not that hard to make fangames (assuming my previous suggestions were followed to some extent). Believe me, a lot of people who play fangames are also into the idea of making fangames. That’s certainly the case for several people in Flashback’s Discord server. We can go even further with this idea and add game subforums. Each game would have its own subforum people can post in. The game pages would be special topics inside the said subforums and all the comments would be actual replies to that special topic. So certain games could build a small subcommunity there. I’d most certainly make use of that system, but this is not something I see as necessary, just a neat idea I got. But I’m not going to dismiss first 2 ideas completely because there are some parts we can take from them. For an example, I like the idea of accepting rom hacks alongside regular fangames. And as long as we don’t make them MFGG’s secondary focus, there’s no harm in accepting non-Mario fangames too, or heck even non-Nintendo fangames! We need new fangames desperately and these would be some great temporary solutions to get some. Scaring Away the Fangame DevelopersWhat I don’t really understand is that both the community and the staff doesn’t do anything not to lose the fangame developers who somehow happen to stumble upon MFGG. For an example, there was a topic for this really cool fangame “Battle Cross FEVER”. It’s a Smash Bros clone, a pretty interesting one. But unfortunately, I’m the only one who seemed to care enough to reply, and the thread has barely any views. Just, why? It’s one of the most impressive fangames I’ve ever seen on MFGG, and not even any of the staff members decided to reply to its topic. I mean, we can’t force people to actively look for new fangame topics or something, but the staff definitely should do that to get the attention on the said fangame and prevent the fangame from being overlooked. When this happens to me on other forums guess what I do? I just stop posting updates or new releases there since no one really cares about the game. But that’s just a small issue I suppose. It goes worse from here. Well, I’m talking about that whole thing Nick caused. For those who don’t know, Yoshin uploaded rips of Mario Maker 3DS tilesets that look exactly like Random Talking Bush’s rips in Spriter’s Resource. So, Nick just assumed that Yoshin stole that rip and made this comment. It’s kind of rude, and it’s jumping into conclusions way too early. But after that most replies were like “How dare you claim that without an evidence?! She used the same software as Random Talking Bush!”, and everyone was very mad at him. People gave Nick literally no opportunity to defend himself. I mean, how was he supposed to know? If I saw that rip and didn’t know Yoshin as a person, I’d think the same too. I wouldn’t blindly accuse her of course, I’d rather say something like “Did you get this from Spriter’s Resource or is this how the sprites are stored in the game?”, but my point still stands. Oh, and she deleted the submission after RTB suddenly appeared, so sorry if I misremembered things. And look, I’m not blaming Yoshin here, obviously. But it’s not fair not to allow a regular user to defend themselves, while not even questioning a staff member just because they are a staff member. That’s my problem, it’s unfair. And Nick is actually one of the more well known fangame developers out there. His fangame Power Star Frenzy is quite popular, so maybe he deserves at least some degree of respect too considering that MFGG really needs fangames these days. Obviously, every member deserves it but especially those who contribute MFGG’s most lacking field most. Then we also get another more well known fangame developer getting accused for making toxic comments and harassing them emotionally by a staff member, just because the said staff member can’t take a small criticism. And everyone else just watches it or even supports said staff member, but I digress. I kind of like what SFGHQ does for this. They have some kind of a curator role or something on Discord, and they give it to those who made cool fangames and shite. It has a cool color and those who have it can access to a hidden channel and such. It connects those people more to the community, as in “Yeah, we appreciate your cool work.”, and they don’t make their biggest fangame developers leave the community after them disagreeing with the staff. I’m not going to suggest this role thing, because elitism is a thing, but it shows that other fangame communities actually respect the developers, unlike MFGG. Closing StatementsAs I said in the beginning MFGG means to me a lot, so it makes me sad to see the community struggling. MFGG is what made me get into fangames, so I want the best for it. This was supposed to be almost twice as long, but I kinda lost my motivation, which is why it took me so long to write. And lately, I’m feeling like I’ve outstayed my welcome here. At this point instead of enjoying my time on MFGG I’m just getting stressed, especially after an argument I’ve had here a while ago. So, I think I’m going to have a break from MFGG for a while. I will keep working on my fangame Super Mario Flashback though if anyone still cares about that. So yeah thanks for all the stuff. now discuss
[b][size=200]Introduction[/size][/b]
I’ve been a member of this community for more than 5 years at this point, and I first discovered MFGG 7 years ago. That’s a very long time, even though there are a lot of people who have been around much longer than me. And in this 5 years, I slowly watched MFGG evolve, and eventually go downhill and struggle, while the staff couldn’t manage to do much about it.
Okay, first of all, MFGG is one of the first communities I've ever joined. I've made a lot of friends during the time I spent here, and I owe a lot to this site for not only letting me realize my passion for game development but also for the fun times I've had. So yeah, MFGG means a lot to me, which is why I’m writing this. I simply don’t want to see a site that’s so important to me to die while there are things we can do to Make MFGG Great Again.
I might be a bit harsh and criticize the staff, but I still love most of them. And as you guys know, I’m from Turkey, and I’ve never written anything this long in my life, even in my native language. I rushed this a bit as well since it's boring to write stuff lol, so I’m sorry for the bad grammar, repetitiveness, and whatnot.
[b][size=200]Criticizing the Staff and Communication Issues[/size][/b]
A while ago, there was some drama in Hotel Delfino. Basically, Mit gave the idea of making an official MFGG Discord, but Vinny stated that he didn't like the idea, so Mit, others and I tried to prove the staff that it was a good idea by creating a testing one for discussing stuff and testing the channel layout and such.
But apparently, Cruise also made one before, one that wasn't meant for anyone else to be seen. But then, rest of the staff turned it into a testing Discord while being fully aware of Mit's one. This ended up offending some of the members (mainly Mit, some of the -w folk and I) and making them think that the staff doesn't really trust the members and listen to them. Not only that but also none of the staff could tell us when Cruise made the server or with what purpose, resulting in everyone being really confused.
This is really similar to what happened with the whole The Lockening incident. People criticized the staff for their decisions, and the staff responded with just locking those topics, without giving a proper explanation, and this made people mad. Heck, even some of the staff members simply ran away. The chaos ended when Cruise decided to explain that they were indeed listening to the criticism. That was it, after that everyone calmed down.
The problem with both incidents is that the staff is simply unable to communicate well with the members, especially when things get tense. Like how the staff couldn’t figure out to tell the members that they were indeed listening to the criticism? How couldn’t they realize that continuing doing something that angers the members wouldn’t make them shut up? (in this case, locking topics for no apparent reasons) Or how they couldn’t realize that doing stuff behind the members wouldn’t make them feel ignored? These should be obvious.
What should be done then? Well, in my opinion, the staff should be more open to the members and hide less stuff from them. Right now, it seems like every decision is being done behind closed doors. The Discord server was suggested in the suggestion forums, then we got a reply from Vinny about him being skeptical, and that’s it. Days passed after that, and the staff was dead silent about it. So, it was safe to assume that there wasn’t anything done by it, that’s why Mit opened his testing server, which caused the problems I mentioned above. If the staff discussed this in that suggestion topic, rather than a hidden forum, none of this would happen. Since the staff discussed that in public we would know that something was being done about it. And if Cruse posted that testing server structure in public we wouldn’t try to make our own.
Of course, I’m not saying that everything should be discussed in public, I’m obviously aware that this can’t be done with everything, like member warnings and stuff like that. But in my opinion, if the staff is talking about something that deals with most of the members, then the members should have the right to hear it too, especially if that’s something they would want to hear. But this doesn’t mean the staff shouldn’t learn how to handle tense situations, running away when things get chaotic is still unacceptable, even if they decide to be more open about staff discussion.
That’s not the only thing we can do to increase the communication between the staff and the members. I think it would be great if mods always stated a reason when they locked a topic because I remember that being a huge issue during The Lockening. Deleting threads should also be avoided too, as that leaves a lot of confusion. Just edit and remove the contents of the main post and lock the topic, unless it’s a spambot or something. Same for removing individual posts, just remove the content of it and give a reason why the post got removed, except for the spambots, again. I also think that having a monthly banlist again would be neat.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, can we talk about Nite Shadow being promoted to be a moderator and then admin silently, hidden from everyone? If it wasn’t for Q-Nova most of us wouldn’t be aware of it, and you know that Q-Nova is super good at noticing things. If I remember correctly this was one of the reasons why that drama with Nite Shadow happened.
And speaking of staff promotions, I’m also kinda confused about how the staff are being chosen. I mean don’t get me wrong, I think sending applications is a great idea, but it really doesn’t feel like the staff members are chosen based on them. What I noticed is that the staff members are (most of the times) being chosen solely based on how close they are to the current staff members and how nice they seem to be. It really doesn’t look like the staff considers all factors, factors such as how much they will fit the job based on their past experiences or how much of a positive (and negative) impact they will have on the site.
This is probably the main reason why the staff really doesn’t want to make Mit a staff member as he tends to disagree with them a lot and get involved in a lot with arguments, even though he proved himself to be good at moderating, at least better than most current moderators, with Hotel Delfino. He also seems to be the only one who wants to make big changes to the site (other than me). I’m aware that the things aren’t that simple, and I know that there are other reasons why the staff wouldn’t want to promote him, but still.
By the way, I’m not saying that the staff members are terrible at their jobs, or something like that. I’m only criticizing the staff for their poor decisions, so they can realize their mistakes and the same stuff won’t happen again in the future. No bad intentions here.
[b][size=200]“Quality” Control[/size][/b]
At this point, I’m pretty sure Quality Control team does not exist and is just a hoax, just like World 5 Castle. Joking aside, there are several terrible submissions on the main site and this puzzles me as every submission needs more than 1 vote to get accepted. I will just post links to some of the terrible submissions from 2017 and 2016 that wouldn’t get accepted if QC team actually looked at them.
[list][*][url]https://www.mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb¶m=02&c=2&id=34099[/url]
[*][url]https://www.mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb¶m=02&c=2&id=33821[/url]
[*][url]https://www.mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb¶m=02&c=3&id=33832[/url] (this guy is banned on the forums btw)
[*][url]https://www.mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb¶m=02&c=1&id=33415[/url]
[*][url]https://www.mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb¶m=02&c=1&id=33392[/url]
[*][url]https://www.mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb¶m=02&c=5&id=33984[/url] (It’s submitted without the permission of the original remixer)[/list]
And they took me less then 10 minutes to find lol
The staff also seemed to forget the actual purpose of sprites section of the main site. It is NOT a sprite showcase, nor an archive. It’s simply a bunch of resources for fangame creators. Yet we are seeing a lot of sprite sheets that have no use in fangames get accepted. This includes conversion of old Clickteam libs that are terrible by today’s standards or mediocre sprites in weird styles. Granted, this is far from the biggest problem of the site, but I felt like I had to address it since no one really talks about it.
[b][size=200]DMCA[/size][/b]
MFGG is… uhhh… not doing well compared to other sites such as SMWC and SFGHQ, and there are several reasons behind this. The most obvious one is Nintendo and them shutting down fangames.
They obviously don’t shut down all fangames. If that was the case, they would shut down MFGG as well. But people are not aware of this fact. Rightfully so, the media tends to cover very popular fangames, or the ones that get shut down, because that’s where the clicks at. And the popular fangames tend to be the ones Nintendo likes to shut down most. Don’t believe me? Well 90% of the feedback my fangame gets is related to DMCA or C&D in some form.
[quote]how many time before Big N comes and take this down ?[/quote][quote]Too bad this is not gonna make it like the games killed by nintendo[/quote][quote]y'all really out here expecting nintendo not to protect its copyright despite being legally required to do so?[/quote]
These are the most recent 3 comments I got about the game at the time I wrote this part. It has come to a point where I’m actually getting stressed about it since people only talk about it and not the game itself. And Flashback is much much more popular outside MFGG, as only 2 people from MFGG commented on the last demo, while I got like a hundred of them on Discord, Twitter etc.
So what kind of fangames they shut down? Well there are 3 types of those games:
[list=1][*]Remakes: AM2R, Super Mario 64 HD, Super Mario Remaker, Zelda Maker, Zelda 30th Year Tribute, Full Screen Mario
[*]Fangames that make profit: All the fangames in Game Jolt as it’s possible to make profit there.
[*]Pokemon fangames: Pokemon Uranium, PokeNet[/list]
Only fangame they took down that doesn’t fit these categories is No Mario’s Sky. They probably didn’t Mario to get accosiated with No Man’s Sky and played it safe, so yeah. Some of these fangames weren’t taken down by Nintendo too, but by creators themselves or by bots in Mediafire. This video explains the deal with Mediafire and Jason Allen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_gnwn535eM
And the saddest thing is that even though this has been going on for over a year by now, MFGG staff is doing absolutely nothing about it! They pretty much watched all of this to happen from a distance. So, what’s the solution then? Informing the people of course! Let them know that there’s no risk of making fangames as long as you follow the guidelines. Put this information to the somewhere visible in the main site, as a page or something. Use the social media accounts to promote that page too so more people can learn about it. Just do something about it!
[b][size=200]The Difficulty of Fangame Creation[/size][/b]
However, MFGG’s downfall didn’t start with Nintendo deciding to be aggressive towards fangames. It only made things worse. It all started with MFGG failing at keeping up with the times. See, people aren’t really interested in small minigames anymore. People want to see bigger, more ambitious and flashier fangames. As a result, those who want to make fangames want to make those kind of fangames too, instead of smaller minigames or stuff like that. But that ends up with people either giving up or starting to make fangames that are way too ambitious for them. I’ve seen several examples of this, I’ve warned several people who wanted to start making fangames with something as big as Flashback, and by telling them to start smaller I either got ignored or killed all of their motivation. Minigame competitions are also a good example of this trend, because no one joins them anymore. Everyone is working on a big project, or wanting to work on a big project.
It’s like this for Mario fangames, but when you look at Sonic, things are a bit different. All fangames in Sonic fangaming community are also equally ambitious, yet they do get new members who actually make fangames. Look at SAGE 2017, a lot of people will say it sucked because the games weren’t good. Why? Because most of them were made by beginners. In contrast we hardly get anyone new who’s interested in making fangames these days. And to fix that I think we can get some help from premade engines.
I know, I know, a lot of you guys are prejudged towards engines, but they can be incredibly helpful for our community. Like, simply don't want to spend 3 years to make a fangame, and with engines they don’t really have to waste time by reinventing the wheel. If we had an MFGG Engine that has the essentials needed to make a fangame, we would get a lot more people to make games. And I’m not talking about something bloated, it would only have the basics. It would have the physics, collisions, a basic moveset, some blocks, some items, simple enemies, and ultra-customizable parents for easy enemy, block and other object creation. So, it would be simple enough to prevent clones. This is exactly what Sonic fangaming community did. They made Sonic Worlds, which got the Sonic’s physics etc. perfectly, and a lot of fangames used it. It doesn’t have a full main menu, tilesets, or a lot of example levels, it’s pretty simple. It’s not perfect however, it has some unnecessary stuff which leaded to a lot of fangames using them just because they are there, but it’s nowhere as bad as Hello Engine’s useless shite.
A lot of great and unique fangames were based on premade engines. Power Star Frenzy, Super Mario Dimensions, Super Mario Dimensions 2, Super Mario Bros. Odyssey, Revenge of the Walrus, Luigi's Quest for Nothing, A Typical Mario Game etc. So, if you’re going to say something like: “All you can make with premade engines are fangame clones. I want to see more unique and wacky fangames, not recreations of official games!” please don’t.
Oh yeah, we can have some tutorials too I guess, but YouTube is full of them, so I don't think they are that necessary.
I’m pretty sure some of you are also moaning like grumpy old man, saying stuff like “I miss the old days of fangames when you made simple fangames just for fun!” or something similar. I can’t blame you, because I kinda agree, but that’s not what people are interested anymore. Remember, MFGG is failing because it’s still stuck at 2011’s. It’s time to move on.
[b][size=200]Shifting the Focus[/size][/b]
While not having a lot of fangames is one of MFGG’s problems, the biggest one is the lack of new members. For the last 2 years or so we’ve been struggling with getting new members, and making engines would simply encourage those who already visit MFGG to make fangames. We have to do much more than that.
We have to shift MFGG’s focus.
There were some suggestions for this before, like expanding into other forms of fan creations, such as fan art, ROM hacks, etc., and focusing more on general fan content rather than only fangames. It was discussed [url=https://phpbb.mfgg.net/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=19904]here[/url], but I don’t think this would be a really smart move. First of all, pulling off something like this would be very difficult. We would need to restructure the entire site and make the artists interested in MFGG again. And after that, we would get a bunch of members that aren’t too into Mario fangames. The last time we had a lot of members that aren’t interested in fangames the forums split into two. And sure, this would fix the member shortage in the short run, but not the lack of fangames. And yeah, we can make some of them interested in fangames, but this whole thing is simply not worth the effort and risks in my opinion.
Another similar suggestion I remember is expanding into and focusing on Nintendo fangames, rather than just Mario. I think I was the first one to make this suggestion, waaaaay back during the Skype days. This is also not a good idea for similar reasons, and it most certainly doesn’t solve our new member shortage.
And here’s my Epic™ suggestion that will solve both problems at once in the most efficient way. Focusing on the players.
Most people come to MFGG to play fangames, and let’s say we are also one of them. We open the home page, and what do we see? Staff members trying to be funny and a big list of newly added sprites. To be able to find some games we need to scroll down a bit to find updates with games. At the time of me writing this, the first game I see is “Yoshi’s Clicker DEMO”. It has no scores, the very first comment is:
[quote="my real irl mom"]It won't run on my PC but I'm sure its absolutely great![/quote]
And the second comment is someone giving the creator advice. The screenshot doesn’t tell much about the game, and the description isn’t very clear. So, we download the game, and it’s the basic tutorial in GM8, with some graphics replaced a terrible MIDI music playing. I’m not making this up, this is an incredibly bad first impression.
The second game is “Made In MFGG - Wario's Mouse Training DEMO”. The screenshot and the description are even less clear this time, but the comments are pretty positive. Aaand it’s an okay WarioWare clone. Opening the games list doesn’t help either as a lot of the games are missing scores and some of those scores are very misleading. Like, there’s a 10/10 review for “9-Volt vs. 18-Volt”, but the actual game is pretty terrible.
I hope you guys see my problem here, it’s simply too hard to find good games. And in my opinion, the only way to fix this issue is redesigning some of the main site in a player friendly way.
First, let’s get rid of the updates. That page might be good for very frequent visitors, but it’s terrible for those who just visit MFGG to play games. Instead, have a proper main page that shows the stuff players want to see. Like first have a section that shows “Staff Picks”, “GOTM Winners”, or just good games that are released somewhat recently, then have a section with the highest rated games ever or something, and lastly just have a list of a list of latest games, sprites and other types of submissions. We don’t have to have the sprites as the main focus since those who are interested in them will open the sprites page anyways. If you guys don’t want to add the best games ever to the main page that can be its own page too, like a “Hall of Fame” or something. But the updates page definitely has to be gone, and there must be an easy way to find the best fangames.
Also, can’t we allow everyone to rate the games simply by commenting? A lot of people don’t bother to review games, so there are a lot of games without scores. This would fix that problem, and people would have a basic idea about the quality of a certain game. We can add a recommendation system like Steam for the reviews too, or idk.
But you might be saying “But MFGG isn’t a site for playing fangames, it’s a site for making fangames!”. And you’re right, but we can’t keep MFGG like this anymore. We are failing to get some fresh blood, and making the site friendlier for those who just want to play fangames is the best way to do that. That’s how SFGHQ built most of its current community, people visited SAGE to play fangames, joined SFGHQ’s Discord to discuss those fangames, and eventually started to make their own fangames. And as I mentioned before, a lot of the games in SAGE 2017 were made by beginners, and these beginners discovered SFGHQ from SAGE 2016.
So yeah, that’s my suggestion. If we do this we will most certainly get new forum users who want to just discuss fangames, and they will eventually start making fangames too, seeing how it’s safe and not that hard to make fangames (assuming my previous suggestions were followed to some extent). Believe me, a lot of people who play fangames are also into the idea of making fangames. That’s certainly the case for several people in Flashback’s Discord server.
We can go even further with this idea and add game subforums. Each game would have its own subforum people can post in. The game pages would be special topics inside the said subforums and all the comments would be actual replies to that special topic. So certain games could build a small subcommunity there. I’d most certainly make use of that system, but this is not something I see as necessary, just a neat idea I got.
But I’m not going to dismiss first 2 ideas completely because there are some parts we can take from them. For an example, I like the idea of accepting rom hacks alongside regular fangames. And as long as we don’t make them MFGG’s secondary focus, there’s no harm in accepting non-Mario fangames too, or heck even non-Nintendo fangames! We need new fangames desperately and these would be some great temporary solutions to get some.
[b][size=200]Scaring Away the Fangame Developers[/size][/b]
What I don’t really understand is that both the community and the staff doesn’t do anything not to lose the fangame developers who somehow happen to stumble upon MFGG. For an example, there was a topic for this really cool fangame “Battle Cross FEVER”. It’s a Smash Bros clone, a pretty interesting one. But unfortunately, I’m the only one who seemed to care enough to reply, and the thread has barely any views. Just, why? It’s one of the most impressive fangames I’ve ever seen on MFGG, and not even any of the staff members decided to reply to its topic. I mean, we can’t force people to actively look for new fangame topics or something, but the staff definitely should do that to get the attention on the said fangame and prevent the fangame from being overlooked. When this happens to me on other forums guess what I do? I just stop posting updates or new releases there since no one really cares about the game. But that’s just a small issue I suppose.
It goes worse from here. Well, I’m talking about that whole thing Nick caused. For those who don’t know, Yoshin uploaded rips of Mario Maker 3DS tilesets that look exactly like Random Talking Bush’s rips in Spriter’s Resource. So, Nick just assumed that Yoshin stole that rip and made [url=https://i.imgur.com/n84MwqD.png]this comment[/url].
It’s kind of rude, and it’s jumping into conclusions way too early. But after that most replies were like “How dare you claim that without an evidence?! She used the same software as Random Talking Bush!”, and everyone was very mad at him. People gave Nick literally no opportunity to defend himself. I mean, how was he supposed to know? If I saw that rip and didn’t know Yoshin as a person, I’d think the same too. I wouldn’t blindly accuse her of course, I’d rather say something like “Did you get this from Spriter’s Resource or is this how the sprites are stored in the game?”, but my point still stands. Oh, and she deleted the submission after RTB suddenly appeared, so sorry if I misremembered things.
And look, I’m not blaming Yoshin here, obviously. But it’s not fair not to allow a regular user to defend themselves, while not even questioning a staff member just because they are a staff member. That’s my problem, it’s unfair. And Nick is actually one of the more well known fangame developers out there. His fangame Power Star Frenzy is quite popular, so maybe he deserves at least some degree of respect too considering that MFGG really needs fangames these days. Obviously, every member deserves it but especially those who contribute MFGG’s most lacking field most.
Then we also get another more well known fangame developer getting accused for making toxic comments and harassing them emotionally by a staff member, just because the said staff member can’t take a small criticism. And everyone else just watches it or even supports said staff member, but I digress.
I kind of like what SFGHQ does for this. They have some kind of a curator role or something on Discord, and they give it to those who made cool fangames and shite. It has a cool color and those who have it can access to a hidden channel and such. It connects those people more to the community, as in “Yeah, we appreciate your cool work.”, and they don’t make their biggest fangame developers leave the community after them disagreeing with the staff. I’m not going to suggest this role thing, because elitism is a thing, but it shows that other fangame communities actually respect the developers, unlike MFGG.
[b][size=200]Closing Statements[/size][/b]
As I said in the beginning MFGG means to me a lot, so it makes me sad to see the community struggling. MFGG is what made me get into fangames, so I want the best for it. This was supposed to be almost twice as long, but I kinda lost my motivation, which is why it took me so long to write.
And lately, I’m feeling like I’ve outstayed my welcome here. At this point instead of enjoying my time on MFGG I’m just getting stressed, especially after an argument I’ve had here a while ago. So, I think I’m going to have a break from MFGG for a while. I will keep working on my fangame Super Mario Flashback though if anyone still cares about that. So yeah thanks for all the stuff.
now discuss
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