In June, based on the suggestions of community members, we opened a Devlog channel in the Gandi IDE Discord server. As of July 21st, there have been 35 develogs posted in this channel. The popularity of the channel is third only to the general and Scratch Game Jam channels on the server.
Writing a devlog during the game development process has many benefits:
- Recording progress: Devlogs can help you record the progress of game development. It is a good opportunity for you to review and summarize your work, and it also allows others to understand the progress of your game development.
- Reflection and improvement: By writing devlogs, you can reflect on your work better. You can record the challenges you have encountered, the methods you used to solve problems, and your thought process. This helps you better understand your working style and find ways to improve.
- Building a community: By regularly updating devlogs, you can attract and build a community of supporters and players. They can track the progress of your game development and provide feedback and suggestions. This interaction helps you better understand players' needs and increase the playability and attractiveness of the game.
- Promotion and marketing: Devlogs are effective tools for promoting and marketing your game. By sharing your development process, game screenshots, and videos, you can attract more attention and generate interest. This helps increase the visibility of your game and attract more players.
- Building a personal brand: By regularly updating devlogs, you can build your own personal brand. This helps establish your professional image in the game development field and increases your recognition in the industry.
In our channel, Outrunfungus43's Astral Avalanche: Limbo (Remake/Sequel) has accumulated over 1300 messages. In this post, we can see the phenomenon of mutual assistance among creators and everyone contributing to the project together.
These devlogs are impressive. Gandi IDE team hopes to provide a better experience for devlog creators and hopes that more creators can start creating their own devlogs and work together with the community to create better games.
In the past few days, we have talked to several devlog creators and decided to make the following optimizations to the Devlog channel.
New post tags
We have added a batch of tags for posts, which are divided into 4 categories.
Project status tags
Used to mark the current status of the project.
- 🤔 Concept: The game is just an idea and is still in the conceptual stage.
- 💻 Working on Demo: Currently working on creating a demo.
- 🎟️ Early Access: Early testing phase, players can try it out and provide feedback.
- 🎉 Released: Official version released.
Tool tags
Used to mark the tools used in the project.
- 🅶 Gandi IDE
- 🆃 TurboWarp
- 😸 Scratch
Desired comments tags
Used to mark the comments that the author hopes to receive.
- 👂 Collecting Feedback: Looking forward to feedback on the game.
- 🤝 Open cooperation: Looking for collaborators to work together through the devlog.
Special tags
- 6️⃣ Scratch Game Jam #6: Works participating in Scratch Game Jam #6.
Gallery View
We have set the display mode of devlogs to Gallery View. Creators can set an eye-catching cover for their posts to attract more attention to their devlogs.
Poll function
Creators can use the "/poll create" command in a post to create a poll. This can be used when you want players to choose one option from multiple choices.
These are the updates to the Devlog channel. We encourage more people to start updating their own devlogs, for example:
- Creators participating in the Scratch Game Jam can update their progress in the devlog. In the 7th edition of the competition, we will use Devlog instead of the existing jam-progress channel.
- Creators who are looking for teammates in the collab channel can create a post in the devlog to recruit teammates for their project. We believe that project-based collaboration will be a better way.
We have many other new content based on devlog, stay tuned. Looking forward to reading your devlogs