Publicity, we dont just need a team, we need a community

[embuddy]

Hi, its me, the guy who made the Fernando sprite in all its glory.

I've figured out that the most detrimental thing to Topaz as of now is not time, its people. 99% of the people here sit and watch, we need to grow the community and coding team to better suit Topaz, due to it being the size, if not larger of a Pokemon game.

Some ways to advertise:

-Showoff the game no matter what shitty condition it is in, via Youtube.

-Start making advertisement in the pokemon rom making subreddits. They are a great place to get people hooked to our series.

-Generally, post everywhere about us and our progress.

-Revamp the forums, logos, etc.

-Provide an interesting twist to Topaz that changes the Pokemon rubric. Its easy to make Topaz into a pokemon clone, but the true goal of this is to see how far we can make it. Create something new like variations or a dumbed down mega evolution system in order to draw people in.

We need to save Topaz from crashing. We've made it so far.

[Cyndadile]

The issue is that most of our members have a lot less time than they used to. You're right; we could use a thriving community. And I encourage anything you can do to attract people. We have a lot of material available across the site for advertising, and if you're willing to put in the time to head up the effort, that would be amazing. We could use some new blood with the time and energy to get things moving faster.

I'm not so sure that a revamp to the forums would be an appropriate use of time. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think that's what is going to bring people in.

[embuddy]

Thanks for replying. My summer should be the perfect time for me to work. Ill start advertising, and tbh, a bit of the forums graphics are outdated for 2015. We shouldn't take anyone away from actually coding or spriting, so ill advertise for a website specialist. Im in high school right now, and I have loads of nerd friends and a coding class at my school. Hopefully someone will take interest.
As for small stuff, switching the main colors of the site to a darker and more transparent shade would help. The forum buttons and logo might look better if we used our actual sprites rather than the concept art.
As for coding, im not that good, and as for spriting, any time you need me ill do it.

[Black Temple Gaurdian]

What we need is advertising in the right place: the pokessentials forum. What we need for that... varies on where we want our thread to be. I could of done more recently, but alas cancer. Gone now, but so is my free time. Also of note: I coded the vast majority of our custom moves within a day. With no coding knowledge. Sure it was mostly copied and pasted or reverse engineered, but my point is what we really need is people able to simply set aside a chunk of time.

[embuddy]

Yea, that is true, what im saying is that it'd be best to have a bigger community so someone is doing something everyday.
I am really good at video editing, so possibly in the summer with some raw gameplay footage I could make a trailer. We may not be that far ahead yet, though. Also, it depends upon if I get time in the summer. I will make sure to advertise, so even if I cant work on it, I should get some new people on the project.

[embuddy]

Ive recently been advertising on reddit, and a user by the name of /u/mCseq has given me crucial info on bettering our community:


I am also interested in helping but after spending some time looking through the forums I honestly have no idea how to get started. It looks like that info is scattered across multiple forums and posts. Maybe I'm just bad at navigating forums, but I find them to be messy and chaotic when it comes to searching for information.

I suggest gathering everything together in one place and making it easy for people to contribute. Links to download all resources, guides on how to get started, lists of development goals, progress updates, links to forums for each development goal, etc... Use the forums as support for the main development page, not as the development page.

If this already exists then it should be made easier to find and you should point new developers in the direction of that instead of the forums.

edit: I guess the point I'm trying to get to is that if you want more people to help, you need to have things organized so that they know how to help and can get started with the least amount of resistance.


Please pass this along. I'd love to see this project move along and once it's easy for me to get started, I'm on board.

If you guys need an example of how to present the project, take a look at any successful project on Assembly or a large open source project on github, like Ruby on Rails.

[embuddy]

The issue brought up by mCseq is actually being very problematic. Alot of people agree, we need to fully sort our files and things we have done on an area in the site, and have it easily downloadable. A person recommended we use Github for our work if we arent already. From what I can tell, organization is our biggest issue, not time.

[Black Temple Gaurdian]

How it happened is easy. We had a large and successful community. Then the provider pulled it without warning, explaination or a chance to recover anything. Because they were assholes.

[embuddy]

Thing is, its not about how it will happen, its how you guys fix the aftermath. I have seen little work on improving the site in years. My advice is to keep relevant things like the plot, the map, the code, the sprites, all of it, and just get a new site with maybe a nicer forum, and easier access to a downloadable of the unfinished code.
it would both give the avg player a taste of whats to come and would give a coder something to work with. If you are afraid of stealing you could always have an application form to get it.