Perihelion
Sponsor
What are critique groups?
People with active projects may band together and form critique groups. Each group gets its own private top-level forum, and then every member in the group gets a subforum for their project. The idea here is that you post in everyone else's forums, and they post in yours. Additionally, everyone in the group will have the ability to bring in outside people for additional critiques. We'll be controlling access via usergroups, and I'm going to make all group members group leaders, so you can give more people access by going to User Control Panel > Usergroups > Manage Groups > Manage Users.
How is this useful compared to a PD thread?
When you have an entire subforum, you can go into much greater depth than you can in a PD thread. Your PD thread is your public face; you want the stuff that goes in there to be polished. This gives you a convenient repository to store everything from vague ideas to threads full of pictures or music you find inspiring to extremely detailed plot and character and setting synopses and cutscene scripts. We want to encourage this writing stuff in particular. A lot of people have been reluctant to post extensive information about plot and character in PD or CD because of spoilers, so the writing in games here is frequently not as strong as it could be with outside input. This gives you the opportunity to post your spoilerific stuff for feedback without wrecking the game for everyone who wants to play it. You can also go into greater depth because you can make multiple threads to keep everything nice and organized.
We're keeping them private because we don't want these to take away from PD activity. Your PD thread should still be your public face, and we still want you to update it; this is just for things you don't want to post in PD.
How is this better than private subforums?
Let's face it, no one uses private subforums. The main problem with those is that the extremely limited audience simply isn't useful; it usually ends up with one person talking to himself. Please note that we're not taking them away, however; all private subforums will remain as they are unless you want yours moved into a critique group.
Some of the staff tried this with our private subforums, and we decided it was totally awesome to have other people reading our ideas and giving feedback, so we're getting the rest of you do the same thing!
How can I get a critique group?
The only requirement is that you have some kind of active project in development. That's right, you don't have to be a sponsor anymore! I don't really wanna go making a bunch of boards for games that don't exist only to have them never be posted in, so I'm going to want you to either post a project thread link here or PM me samples of stuff you want to put up for critique (e.g. plot and character synopses). Basically I just want you to indicate to me that you're serious about making a game and have content ready to go. If I want more info, I'll let you know.
After I give you the green light, you need to find a group to join. A group needs at least three people, but I'd recommend at least five or six. You can use this thread to find groupmates. After you have a group, you need a name for your group forum (a placeholder is fine; I have no problem changing it later) and a list of the subforums you want. I really don't care if you want it set up in a different way from what I suggested; all that matters is that you have at least three people commenting on each other's work. If you want a million subforums, I don't care as long as you're using them all for something. If you want to make a group forum for a big programming or pixel or music project or whatever else, that's also perfectly fine.
Application Process
Just post a project link or PM me some info so I know you actually have something you've been working on. I'm not going to be a hardass about this; the only requirement is that you've put some thought into it and have stuff you want feedback on. If you have stuff that isn't strictly working on a game that you want feedback on, that's also fine!
After that, post what you want your subforum to be called and the desired description, and I'll go ahead and add you to the group. See the second post for other people in the group. If you specifically want to form another group with different people, let me know, but the more the merrier.
---
One last note: inactive forums will be moved to an archive for neatness but left unlocked, so if they're later active, they can be unarchived. Just shoot me or another admin a PM if you want it moved out of the archive.
People with active projects may band together and form critique groups. Each group gets its own private top-level forum, and then every member in the group gets a subforum for their project. The idea here is that you post in everyone else's forums, and they post in yours. Additionally, everyone in the group will have the ability to bring in outside people for additional critiques. We'll be controlling access via usergroups, and I'm going to make all group members group leaders, so you can give more people access by going to User Control Panel > Usergroups > Manage Groups > Manage Users.
How is this useful compared to a PD thread?
When you have an entire subforum, you can go into much greater depth than you can in a PD thread. Your PD thread is your public face; you want the stuff that goes in there to be polished. This gives you a convenient repository to store everything from vague ideas to threads full of pictures or music you find inspiring to extremely detailed plot and character and setting synopses and cutscene scripts. We want to encourage this writing stuff in particular. A lot of people have been reluctant to post extensive information about plot and character in PD or CD because of spoilers, so the writing in games here is frequently not as strong as it could be with outside input. This gives you the opportunity to post your spoilerific stuff for feedback without wrecking the game for everyone who wants to play it. You can also go into greater depth because you can make multiple threads to keep everything nice and organized.
We're keeping them private because we don't want these to take away from PD activity. Your PD thread should still be your public face, and we still want you to update it; this is just for things you don't want to post in PD.
How is this better than private subforums?
Let's face it, no one uses private subforums. The main problem with those is that the extremely limited audience simply isn't useful; it usually ends up with one person talking to himself. Please note that we're not taking them away, however; all private subforums will remain as they are unless you want yours moved into a critique group.
Some of the staff tried this with our private subforums, and we decided it was totally awesome to have other people reading our ideas and giving feedback, so we're getting the rest of you do the same thing!
How can I get a critique group?
The only requirement is that you have some kind of active project in development. That's right, you don't have to be a sponsor anymore! I don't really wanna go making a bunch of boards for games that don't exist only to have them never be posted in, so I'm going to want you to either post a project thread link here or PM me samples of stuff you want to put up for critique (e.g. plot and character synopses). Basically I just want you to indicate to me that you're serious about making a game and have content ready to go. If I want more info, I'll let you know.
After I give you the green light, you need to find a group to join. A group needs at least three people, but I'd recommend at least five or six. You can use this thread to find groupmates. After you have a group, you need a name for your group forum (a placeholder is fine; I have no problem changing it later) and a list of the subforums you want. I really don't care if you want it set up in a different way from what I suggested; all that matters is that you have at least three people commenting on each other's work. If you want a million subforums, I don't care as long as you're using them all for something. If you want to make a group forum for a big programming or pixel or music project or whatever else, that's also perfectly fine.
Application Process
Just post a project link or PM me some info so I know you actually have something you've been working on. I'm not going to be a hardass about this; the only requirement is that you've put some thought into it and have stuff you want feedback on. If you have stuff that isn't strictly working on a game that you want feedback on, that's also fine!
After that, post what you want your subforum to be called and the desired description, and I'll go ahead and add you to the group. See the second post for other people in the group. If you specifically want to form another group with different people, let me know, but the more the merrier.
---
One last note: inactive forums will be moved to an archive for neatness but left unlocked, so if they're later active, they can be unarchived. Just shoot me or another admin a PM if you want it moved out of the archive.
