Community Site Ideas/Brainstorm

Arcade
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As I build games and see the forum flooded with “check out my game” posts I see a potential for a “community hub” style page.

In the Game Jam post I mentioned how it would be nice for this platform to have a sort of “find and discover” games mechanic similar to how people find/comment/expand-upon Scratch games.

So here’s what I was thinking (being a full-time web developer): A Community Website:

  • Announcements can be made and read about (not lost in a forum)
  • Submit games to the collection
  • Games can be searched based on title, description and tags (genre, extensions used, etc)
  • Games have their own page which allows people to comment/discuss
  • An easy way to build-upon the games and possibly a “expanded upon by X games” (similar to remixes in thingiverse)

My other thoughts would include helpful utilities such as a more GUI way of importing images, a new UI for merging assets across games into a single game (so more than one person can work on a game at a time and easily merge without having to know git)

Just throwing ideas out there to see if anyone has ideas, knows of something that already exists, etc… Mostly I want to help makecode arcade become better than ever!

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These are some nice ideas.
However if you’re submitting games to a collection like you mentioned here:

That would be more to moderate and we already kinda have that. There is a tag called game that you can use to specifically search for games. So we don’t really need that. It was a great idea though.

I really love your ideas about adding more UI.
Keep up the great work.

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This should be in Forum Feedback

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Yeah I guess I was thinking something a bit more visual than a list of forum topics with crazy topic names.

Moderation is a thing for sure and that would be a bit of a burden but not much more than what I see something like spriters resource doing.

I guess I see it as a “list of worth playing” games with a bit more visual flair like a preview of the cover art etc.
similar to the cover arts of Pico-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

With a bit of the “splore” angle and the “explore” view of scratch. Searching forums can be daunting and hard to know if things are worth launching. Ratings, comments, etc would be nice to have a bit more structure.

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Nice idea.
However if we’re making a list of games like that and judging by visuals some people might get upset because they didn’t get there game in. It’s important to remember that this site has kids the age of 13 on it. Kids who might not be as emotionally developed as adults. So not getting their game in could be quite a big deal for some of them.

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Didn’t realize that was a thing and it also seems a lot of those posts are off topic too “Sonic of this platform” etc.

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No. This is good enogh

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I remember @jacob_c did something for this a while back:

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and of course @UnsignedArduino has his awesome extension compendium: https://awesome-arcade.vercel.app/

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Sounds like there’s no appetite and those existing sites are doing what I was hoping. So that’s one less project for me :grinning:

Thanks for the heads up, better to stop now vs when I’m actually invested in something.

Now to wander around those sites…

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Actually, there is a way to import images. https://kristianpedersen.github.io/Convert-Image-to-MakeCode-Arcade-Sprite/ It’s not official, though. Hopefully they’ll make an official one someday.

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I do want to add a games section to Awesome Arcade’s at some point. :grin:

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Yeah I knew about that one. It’s just all of these things are so spread out and misc. I was thinking of ways to get it all in a single spot to help people use and learn without having to search so much (google, forums, etc etc)

And I was thinking taking that importer to the next step with an editor.

The other idea was to help teams of people build the same project. So if someone makes the sprites and one makes the audio and one makes the code. It’s very hard to merge unless you know what you are doing with the jres file and merging.

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@Kikketer if you have any questions about jres, or asset formats in general, i’m happy to help! you might also find it useful to look at https://github.com/shakao/arcade-sprite-pack, which is a tool that I made with @shakao a while back for managing assets of arcade projects. it’s hosted here: https://shakao.github.io/arcade-sprite-pack/

collaboration is something we would love to improve but it’s a very hard problem! particularly for blocks coding which has a lot of considerations that make merging files more difficult than it is for normal text code.

as for a greater community type experience like what scratch has, that’s also something that we talk about a lot. stuff like that comes with a ton of compliance, privacy, moderation, and safety requirements (as it should!) which makes it a very large undertaking

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Yeah I understand the undertaking it would have to increase the social aspect and still keep the area safe.

Merging blocks is one of the reasons I try to convince people to throw typescript :wink:

But merging assets and having someone not have to even open the jres file seems like a reasonable first step. Of course this would likely require “official” updates but in the mean time I can dream of what a reasonably ideal flow would look like.

I’m still learning like crazy and figured out the merge of assets via trial and error :grinning: