General Godus discussion

The same thing happened with Starbound going from a procedural "Terraria in spaaaaaace!" to a linear platformer with static missions and other elements, while Chucklephish went off to play publisher and work on another game, leaving Starbound in the same aimless wandering about that folks saw with Godus until it became an abomination unto itself.

When Planet Centauri was seeking funding, those still waiting for Starbound were quite skeptical because of the Chucklephish burn.

As these guys have said I'm not backing these things at the moment, mainly out of protest. I believe there are too many charlatans operating in EA/kickstarter and until they evolve to deal with it I'm not supporting those mechanisms.

I am interesting in universe sim and when it goes into alpha I'll read and comment on what people have to say about it. If people make YouTube videos I'll watch those and when I hear from the community that it's legit I'll buy it. I want it to succeed and nothing would make me happier than seeing them succeed where peter failed but I won't back it in the dark.

Fair enough, I'm pretty much in the same boat with a few small exceptions. I pledged to The Universim Kickstarter back when it first launched, which was the same time period as Godus Kickstarter, so I was already invested before being burned. Same goes for a number of games I pledged to; they were all around 2012-2013 and I'm still waiting for most to deliver. However, most so far have been vastly more encouraging than Godus has been in a long time.

And I never pre-order any games any more.

Exactly! That's a very good point that I forgot to make. I recommend checking out The Universim and Dimension Drive as a gamer general interest; there's no need to buy it to discuss it (just don't then troll and bully the community.)

If you don't mind me throwing in my 'community manager' perspective on this, I feel that it would be wise to look into the long term sustainability of this community. While I still hope for the best for the team at 22cans and Godus as a game and project, I still admit (and I think most people would freely admit) that there maintains a liklihood that Godus won't ever get properly off the ground in the way that we (devs, ex-devs, the community, etc.) are hoping it will. So whether we like it or not, there might be an undetermined expiration date for this community if it remains exclusive to Godus. All that to say, it might not be a bad idea to cast a wider net in regards to the games that this community caters to. Granted, that strategy only makes sense if the existing community is largely here for the comradery more than the game itself which, I gather, is probably the case. If that's true, then the games that these forums cater to are merely supplementary to the community itself, in which case any loyalty or exclusivity towards one game in particular wouldn't be quite as crucial and could even, in fact, be detrimental in the long run.

That said, I would adhere to a 'theme' of some kind. As in, functioning primarily as a community site for god games, or city building games, or any other overall theme of some kind. In fact, an overall theme of providing a place of community for the god game genre in its entirety might work. That way you could expand into new franchises, such as The Universim, as well as maintaining relevance to Godus and even giving relevance to supporting god game classics such as Populous, Black & White, and so forth. In terms of attracting people to the community, being active in the game's respective Steam forums, creating a community Facebook group, Steam group, and Twitter profile would all be a good place to start. Aside from functioning as a means of 'community advertising', this also allows community members to engage with this community in whichever way works best for them. Aka, some people will only ever interact with the Facebook group, some people may only ever visit the forums, and then there'll be 'core' users who traverse all community channels equally. Granted, this will surely increase your workload as you branch out, but the trade off is greater longterm sustainability for the website.

Just my random thoughts though! I wouldn't want to encourage you to choose one path over the other and I certainly wouldn't want to step on my old coworker's toes by trying to convert one of their fan sites away from them. So take all that with a grain of salt I suppose.

I joined because I originally saw a group of genuinely intelligent people having gathered for a specific cause, and have enjoyed the banter since. Blob rest the forum souls of those that have moved on for various reasons, but I would stick around, not every day you get to chit chat with Community Rockstars and the like.

This is exactly why I made the suggestion and honestly I've been feeling this coming for a long time now. I think the time might be right to branch out. But I don't want to branch out too far right away. Keep it manageable. So that's why I think adding a section for Universim might be a good idea. And I'd take the Whatever section out of the godus board and make that its own section as well.

Might be a good niche, there aren't any unofficial Universim forums that I know of... however, this forum was (if I recall correctly) created to serve a specific purpose to fit a specific need. I'm not sure the same situation would be/is true of The Universim, so you'd have to be creative, otherwise it's competing with the main forums directly.

Who knows... maybe they have a Commmunity Rockstar that would want to play ball with you on a side venue.

If we've learnt anything from godus it's that we need our own forum where we control the deletion policy. I'm not suggesting they'll pull the same crap but let's be prepared just in case. It's easier to organise a resistance with the forum in place than it is to build it up quickly when we need it.

One of the best things that happened was that Matthew and George plugged this forum and later Fabs, Feanix (did we ever find out where he went?) and Moo came here and engaged. Maybe the universe sim people would endorse us in the same way?