Exposure to the outside world (Crafty marketing)

[matthijsgroen]

In my opinion, Crafty is a real nice framework to work with, with nice features. But there are a bunch of other frameworks out there, which have a stronger marketing look for outsiders.

Even on http://www.html5gamedevs.com/, there is no 'Crafty' section, and the crafty website does not really look 'sexy'. Is there anyone in control of this? Any games to showcase with awesome graphics? At the moment the games listed on crafty are games using existing (old) game-art, even some links are plain broken.

[kevinsimper]

Hi @matthijsgroen

You are right and you bring up some good points! :+1: :smile: You can find the website at https://github.com/craftyjs/craftyjs.github.com and it is right now just a simple jekyll website. The more people that help the better. Is there something you think could be a good start task on the website?

[matthijsgroen]

The best start would be showing an awesome game of course :-) One that has great artwork and visuals.

[starwed]

the crafty website does not really look 'sexy'. Is there anyone in control of this?

I did the most recent website revamp -- it could definitely be improved! One big obstacle is the lack of nice design elements; I have no artistic ability, and that restricted what sort of layouts made sense to use. I essentially stuck to a slightly nicer version of the original design.

When it comes to demos, obviously we're somewhat limited by what games people would like to submit. :) We could perhaps make a list of 2 or 3 very simple game types and implement them specifically for the purpose of demoing Crafty. With some nicer graphics and some perf improvments this webgl demo I made might be a good, very simple demo. (I can't find any licensing info on the octocat sprite I used, so we'd need to find a sprite with a nice, smooth running animation.)

[200sc]

Is there a standard place to submit games we make for demo consideration?

[starwed]

@Sythe2o0 While we should perhaps think about an "official" process, I'd say that simply posting in the newsgroup or in this github issue suffices for now! :)

You could also email me (and probably mucaho and kevinsimper), but putting in a place where everyone can see it probably works best.

[200sc]

The most recent jam game I've done is probably stable enough - http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=54627

I did a couple other jam games but they suffer from serious display and speed bugs which, while fixed in newer versions of Crafty, would require remaking a good amount of the game.

I'm also still on a team that's working on a much larger game here but out of speed concerns with Crafty we're actually dissecting Crafty and adding in threejs for rendering and collision soon. It's also multiplayer-online only and doesn't have a userbase.

[matthijsgroen]

A few things that could help:

• Articles on how to start on a game
• Articles for specific items (gamepad, touchscreen, platform, etc)
• Demo games
• A catalog of games, that has tags (Touch, In development, Free, etc)

There is also a twitter account for crafty, is that used at all?

[matthijsgroen]

At 16th of April I will talk about game development/Crafty in Eindhoven, NL:

http://nextbuild.nl/sessions/speedlazer-lunch-break-game-development/

[tskaufma]

I've yet to update my game to use a newer version of Crafty, but Grimm's Battlefield is made with Crafty version 0.6.2. Feel free to feature it on the website.

Edit: Forgot to include the link: https://grimmsbattlefield.firebaseapp.com/

[mucaho]

@200sc , @tskaufma Thank you both for your submissions! The demos should show up on the frontpage soon.