#also like there's barely an algorithm on tumblr? you have to tag stuff correctly* and expand your network to be seen

[thirddeadlysin]

al gore did not invent the internet and name algorithms after himself so that a bunch of people could somehow believe there's an algorithm on ao3 suppressing fics from becoming popular (?????????) or whatever

[popfizzles]

Hey Hey!! Was just wondering if you had any tips for getting started on tumblr - also love your stuff :D

okay so first of all thank you for the compliment. now on to the long ass post of me analyzing tumblr for you

first tip: your dash (short for dashboard, the main body of the site, what you see when you first open the site) will 98% be posts from you and people you follow. if you do not reblog or post things, other people's dashboards will be empty, and the posts will never reach other people. this is why everyone advocates for reblogging posts! tumblr may be a broken mess of a hellsite but its the single most functional site when it comes to keeping the algorithm away. nowadays there is a for-you tab, and blazed posts (posts people pay to show up on other dashboards), but when you first log in to the tumblr dashboard, the majority of posts you see are because THE PEOPLE YOU FOLLOW put them there for you to look at. so do not hesitate to reblog things. if you have a specialized aesthetic or a themed blog, make a sideblog dedicated to reblogging random bullshit you like. here on tumblr, WE are the algorithm. we all have to do our part.

second tip: tumblr is super fandom-oriented. this is the fandom site. original works do not get as much traction here compared to already popular content. if your plan is to make it big as a comic artist or an author, I suggest you build an audience first, doing fanworks of things you like. once you've found a niche and a supportive following for yourself, its okay to branch out and introduce your own original content. subject your followers to your own blorbos, force them to look at your special little guys. from what i've seen, once people are used to your content, a majority will be more accepting to learning about your ocs. i know for a fact that i have gotten people into fandoms they have not followed me for. it becomes a community moment--OUR hyperfixation. but, i suggest starting by finding a place in a fandom community first, and getting your foot in the door.

third tip: please for the love of god, use tags correctly. like i said before, there is extremely little algorithm here. putting your posts into popular, vague tags does not work, it just makes people frustrated. when i search a tag on tumblr, i should ONLY see posts regarding that tag. the search function barely works as it is. if a character is not mentioned on the post, do NOT put their name in the tags. you're just bloating the tag with unrelated shit and drowning out the actual content. and you do not want to be that guy. extra point for the third tip: it's considered more polite to add comments in the tags than in the body of the post. people on tumblr like to read tags for compliments or silly comments :) its like finding a nice treat that was hidden. full sentences in the tags are a-okay and encouraged!

fourth tip: don't get discouraged when your works that you've spent hours upon hours on get ignored, and the shitty joke post you made at 4 AM blows up with thousands of notes. that just happens here. sorry.

good luck sorry for the long post <3

[blubberquark]

Seven Types of Game Devs And The Games They Make

The Computer Science Student

The computer science student had to write a game for class in the fourth semester. The game must demonstrate OOP design and programming concepts, and solid grasp of C++.

This game is written not to be fun to play, but to demonstrate your skill to the professors - or to their poor assistants who have to read the code and grade the accompanying term paper. The core loop of the game is usually quite simple, but there are many loosely connected mechanics in there that barely don’t really fit. For example, whatever the core gameplay is, there could be birds in the sky doing some kind of AI swarm behaviour, there could be physics-enabled rocks on the floor, there could be a complicated level and unit editor with a custom XML-based format, and all kinds of weird shaders and particle effects.

And with all this tech infrastructure and OOP, there are just two types of enemies. That’s just barely enough to show you understand how inheritance works in C++.

The core gameplay is usually bad. Un-ergonomic controls, unresponsive game feel, flashy yet impractical 3D GUI widgets make it hard to play - but not actually difficult to beat, just unpleasant. The colours are washed-out, and everything moves a bit too slow. There is no overarching design, the moment-to-moment gameplay is not engaging, and the goal feels like an afterthought.

But that’s ok. It is to be expected. The professors are CS professors. They (or rather their assistants) don’t grade the game based on whether the units are balanced, whether the graphics are legible, or whether the game is any fun at all. They grade on understanding and correctly applying what you learned in class, documentation, integration of third-party libraries or given base code, and correct implementation of an algorithm based on a textbook.

The CS student usually writes a tower defense game, a platformer, or a SHMUP. After writing two or three games like this, he usually graduates without ever having gotten better at game design.

The After-Hours Developer

The after hours programmer has a day job doing backend business logic stuff for a B2B company you never heard of.

This kind of game is a labour of love.Screenshots might not look impressive at first glance. There is a lot going on, and the graphics look a bit wonky. But this game is not written to demonstrate mastery of programming techniques and ability to integrate third-party content, tools and libraries. This game was made, and continues to be developed, because it is fun to program and to design.

There is a clear core loop, and it is fun and engaging. The graphics are simple and functional, but some of them are still placeholder art. This game will never be finished, thus there will always be place-holders as long as the code gets ahead of the art. There is no XML or cloud-based savegame in there just because that is the kind of thing would look impressive in a list of features.

More than features, this games focuses on content and little flourishes. This game has dozens of skills, enemies, weapons, crafting recipes, biomes, and quests. NPCs and enemies interact with each other. There is a day-night cycle and a progression system.

While the CS student game is about showing off as many tech/code features as possible, this kind of programmer game is about showing off content and game design elements and having fun adding all this stuff to the game.

This game will be finished when the dev gets bored with adding new stuff. Only then, he’ll plan to add a beginning and an ending to the game within the next six months, and go over the art to make it look coherent. The six months turn into two years.

The after-hours developer often makes RPGs, metroidvanias, or rogue-like games. These genres have a set of core mechanics (e.g. combat, loot, experience, jumping) and opportunity for a bunch of mechanics built around the core (e.g. pets, crafting, conversation trees, quest-giving NPCs, achievements, shops/trading, inventory management, collecting trinkets, skill trees, or combo attacks).

The First-Time Game Jammer

The first-time game jammer wants to make his first game for an upcoming game jam. He knows many languages, but he does a lot of machine learning with torch7 for his day job, so he has decided to use LÖVE2D or pico-8 to make a simple game.

This guy has no training in digital art, game design, or game feel. But the he has a working knowledge of high-school maths, physics, and logic. So he can write his own physics engine, but doesn’t know about animation or cartoon physics. He doesn’t waste time writing a physics engine though. He just puts graphics on the screen. These graphics are abstract and drawn in mspaint. The numbers behind everything are in plain sight. Actions are either triggered by clicking on extradiegetic buttons or by bumping into things.

The resulting game is often not very kinetic or action-oriented. In this case, it often has a modal/stateful UI, or a turn-based economy. If it is action-oriented, it could be a simple platformer based around one core mechanic and not many variations on it. Maybe it’s a novel twist on Pong or Tetris.

The first-time game jammer successfully finished his first game jam by already knowing how to program in Lua, copying a proven game genre and not bothering to learn any new tools during the limited jamming time. Instead, he wrote the code to create every level by hand, in separate .lua files, using GNU EMACS.

The Solo Graphic Designer

The graphic designer has a skill set and approach opposite to those of the two programmers described above. He is about as good at writing code as the programmer is at drawing images in mspaint. The graphic designer knows all about the principles of animation, but has no idea how to code a simple loop to simulate how a tennis ball falls down and bounces off walls or the ground. He used to work in a team with coders, but this time he wants to make his own game based on his own creative vision.

The graphic designer knows all about animation tools, 3D modelling, composition. He has a graphic tablet and he can draw. He knows all about light and shade and gestalt psychology, but he can’t write a shader to save his life.

Naturally, the graphic designer plays to his strengths and uses a game engine with an IDE and a visual level editor, like Unity3D, Construct, or GameMaker.

The graphic designer makes a successful game by doing the opposite of what the coder does, because he does it well. The screenshots look good, and his game gets shared on Twitter. He struggles writing the code to aim a projectile at the cursor in a twin-stick shooter, but we live in a world of Asset Stores and StackOverflow.

The resulting game is a genre-mixing thingy full of set pieces, cut scenes, and visual-novel-style conversations. The actual gameplay is walking around and finding keys for locks, but it’s cleverly recontextualised with a #deep theme and boy does it look pretty.

The Engine Coder

The engine coder is like the CS student on steroids. He has nothing to prove. He knows his C++. He lives in a shack in Alaska, and pushes code to GitHub over a satellite connection. He also knows his Lua, C#, Python, and Haskell. The engine coder writes a physics engine, particle system, dialogue engine, planning-based mob AI, savegame system, a network layer and GUI widget library.

He has written five simple demos for the engine: A first-person walking simulator, a third-person platformer, a very pretty glowing orb swarm shader thingy, a non-interactive simulation of a flock of sheep grazing and a pack of wolves occasionally coming in to cull the herd with advanced predator AI, and a game where you fly a spaceship through space.

Somebody comments in the forums that it’s hard to even write Pong or Tetris in the engine. The Engine Coder is more concerned with optimising batched rendering and automatically switching LoD in the BSP tree so you can land on planets in space without loading screens.

The Overeager Schoolboy

The schoolboy has an idea for a game. He saves his money to buy Game Maker (or RPG Maker) and tells his all friends about his amazing idea. Then he makes a post about it on tumblr. Then he makes a sideblog about the game and posts there too, tagged #game development.

Unfortunately, the schoolboy is 15, and while he is talented, he doesn’t really know how to program or draw. He’s good at math, and he can draw with a pencil. Unfortunately, he wants to learn digital art, level design, and programming all in one go. He already knows all the characters for his game, and he writes posts about each of them individually, with pencilled concept art and flavourful lore.

Even more unfortunately, our schoolboy is hazy on how big the game is actually going to be, and what core mechanic the game should be based around.

After designing sprite sheets and portraits for ten characters you could add to your party, plus the Big Bad End Boss, he realises that he has no idea how to get there, or how to make the first level. He starts over with another set of tools and engine, but he doesn’t limit his scope.

In an overdramatic post two months later, he apologises to the people who were excited to play the game when it’s done. A week later he deletes the tumblr. He never releases a playable demo. He never gets constructive feedback from game developers.

The Game Designer’s Game Designer

The game designer’s game designer is not exactly a household name, but he has done this for a while. While you have never heard of him, the people who made the games you like have. All your favourite games journalists also have. Through this connection, many concepts have trickled down into the games you play and the way your friends talk to you about games they like.

The game designer’s game designer has been going at this for a while. When he started, there was no way to learn game design, so he probably studied maths, psychology, computer science, industrial design, or music theory.

The games fall outside of genres, and not just in the sense of mixing two genres together. They are sometimes outside of established genres, or they are clearly inside the tradition of RTS, rogue-likes or clicker games, but they feel like something completely new.

The games of the game designer’s game designer are sometimes released for free, out of the blue, and sometimes commissioned for museums and multimedia art festivals. Some of them are about philosophy, but they don’t merely mention philosophical concepts, or use them to prop up a game mechanic (cloning and transporters, anyone?). They explore concepts like “the shortness of life” or “capitalism” or “being one with the world” or “unfriendly AI” through game mechanics.

But they also explore gameplay tropes like “inventory management“ or “unidentified magic items“ or “unit pathfinding“.

Sometimes bursts of multiple games are released within weeks, after years of radio silence. Should you ever meet the game designer’s game designer, you tell him that you got a lot out of the textbook he wrote, but you feel guilty that you never played one of his games. So you lie and tell him you did.

[forestwater87]

yo got any tips on how to get my gwenvid fic out there?

Ah, this is tricky, and I gotta be honest I think I only lucked out because I wrote the first real Gwenvid fic out there and no one had any other options. But since “go back in time” isn’t really plausible, I can offer some things that I think might be helpful:

1. Make sure you’re tagging them correctly! On both Tumblr and AO3, it’s really useful to make sure you’re using the most-viewed and/or official tags for your content. For example, “campcamp” is the official CC tag, and as far as I can tell “cc david” is more successful and widespread than “david cc” … but that might not be as important as I think it is. But definitely be smart with your tags, especially those first 5, since according to Tumblr Lore those are the ones that … do something something algorithm idk. As for AO3 tags, I’m not really sure how they work, like if the site lumps “Gwen/David” in with “Gwen (Camp Camp)/David (Camp Camp)” – ah, what we had to use when the fandom was still so young and tiny – but I’d err on the side of over-tagging, personally. As long as you’re not one of those people with 30,000 tags it takes ages to scroll past, why not?

2. Reblog a lot! I always feel really really self-conscious resharing my own stuff, but it works! It introduces the work to a new crop of readers and makes a big difference.

3. Use your friends! Use people you barely know! Seriously, if I didn’t have @ciphernetics and @hopefullypessimistic84​ aggressively stanning my work I don’t think anyone would read it. XD And I’m always happy to give someone a shout-out, as long as it’s not something that makes me uncomfortable.

4. Get involved in the fandom! This is a more general thing, but answering asks, doing memes, participating in appreciation weeks, and just generally filling up the tag with content is not only super fun, because we suck up CC and especially Gwenvid content like we’re starving in the desert, but it also helps to get your name out there and get people interested in your stuff. I know I’m considered “the Gwenvid person” by a lot of people who’ve never read my fics and don’t even know I have fics, because I just have so goddamn many screenshots to fling in every direction and ramble about my love of the ship. You can also use that involvement to plug your writing, like the many wonderful fanfics I’ve written that you can check out if you like my other stuff!

5. Credit people! This sounds weird, and may have a tiny bit to do with the fact that I’m salty about this issue, but if you use someone’s AU or headcanon, or even if they just got you inspired by enjoying their work? Tag them! Not only will they be happy that you liked their ideas and are acknowledging their contribution, but it gets them to pay attention to your fic. And hey, if someone inspired you so much you used their ideas, it feels amazing to have them pay attention. (This is also how you make friends in the fandom. Seriously.)

I’m also gonna give a few more types of advice, ranging from making an awesome fanfic to attention-getting. But since the world is kinda unfair, entertainment is very unfair, and fandom is an impossible beast, I also wanna give you some thoughts that I’ve developed over the course of being in this fandom. Under the cut since it’s only tangentially related …

I’m starting with what I personally think makes a fic worth reading. It might not guarantee kudos, but it might be worth thinking about:

1. Get a beta reader. Honestly, having someone comb through your work for things like consistency, characterization, and grammar is hugely important. There are a ton of great fics that suffer for not having someone run their eyes over it, and the fandom is one big happy family; you could throw a rock in any direction and find someone who’d be happy to help you out.

2. Figure out what makes your story worth reading, and emphasize it. This is gonna sound kinda dumb, but I swear half the stuff on AO3 is the same fucking “David adopts Max and may or may not be a serial killer” fic. I realize this is kinda petty of me, but I do think it’s a good idea to know what about your fic is special and worthwhile, because that’s going to be what makes people enjoy and recommend it. (This doesn’t mean don’t use popular tropes or plots, but just to be aware of what you’re bringing to the table, what cool twist or je ne sais quois it is that made you wanna write it. It’s also a great way to prop yourself up when you’re getting down on your work, because it reminds you that you’re doing something original and special.)

3. Consider short chapters (3,000 words or less) and a regular updating schedule. I don’t do this. It’s a problem. But seriously, people enjoy bite-sized content, and regularly adding to it keeps your work at the top of the tags/queue while also keeping the people who like your fic from forgetting about it.

4. Use small paragraphs. No one wants to read a giant block of text, and I know more than once I’ve clicked away after seeing the entire chapter was one big paragraph. Again, bite-sized. Getting people to read a fic is difficult, because it’s asking for an investment of time and mental energy they could be spending on something else. So do what you can to make reading as easy and enjoyable as possible for them.

5. Be mindful of standard grammar. I’m not trying to impose my Western-centric ideals on other people, because there are a lot of valid ways to talk/write and using “proper” grammar doesn’t mean you’re more intelligent by any means; I’m also not trying to discourage the creative and poetic use of nonstandard grammar (lord knows I abuse my artistic license to mess with grammar all the time). But in the name of making things a bit easier to read – especially, as I understand, for ESL readers – adhering to generally-accepted rules of “good” grammar is worth considering.

Unfortunately, your story still might not get the attention it deserves, and I’d like to start by saying I’m very very sorry about that. (I went from the only Gwenvid writer to being, like, that former high school football player who reminisces about the good old days before all these talented whippersnappers came around to upstage me; I’m just saying that I know how much it hurts to feel like your work isn’t being appreciated, whether you think you deserve the appreciation or not.) It sucks, and it hurts, and I’m sorry. I wish more people saw your stuff. 

But some thoughts about dealing with those feelings as well:

1. Get a cheerleader. This is another super useful thing about having a beta, btw. Sometimes you’re going to feel like crap, and you’re going to need someone to prop up your ego and tell you that they think you’re amazing and that they believe in your story. Get as many of these as you need and feel comfortable leaning on them when you’re feeling down.

2. Beg. I make posts begging for compliments on like a twice-a-month basis. It’s kinda pathetic, but it really really helps, so if you have followers, there’s no shame in asking them to say nice things when your self-esteem has taken a beating.

3. Know that attention =/= quality. Like, okay, there are some incredible fics that are rightfully getting their due (fucking Netics and Mouse, talented bitches). But legit, the second-most-kudos’d fic on AO3 is also one of the worst ones I’ve ever run my poor undeserving eyes over, and only the fact that this is under a cut and unlikely to be read by many people is giving me the pettiness to say that. My longest fic, the one I’ve poured the most of myself into, has fewer kudos than a masterpiece called “Camp Campbell’s Cum Dumpster.” I wrote an entire post enumerating just a handful of CC fics I think deserve more attention, and if being well-known and -loved correlated with talent, they’d all be topping the leaderboards in my worthless opinion. But seriously, sometimes your stuff won’t be appreciated. Maybe it doesn’t have enough fluff, or enough angst. Maybe it doesn’t have enough dad//vid. Maybe it’s the fact that nothing will ever grab positive attention like dan//vid and there’s nothing we can do about it. Fans are picky and tricky, and sometimes trying to figure out why something becomes blisteringly popular while something else doesn’t is impossible, but it doesn’t mean your writing isn’t amazing. Believe in the story you’re telling, and that it’s worth telling.

4. Don’t compare yourself to other writers. I feel compelled to put this one on here because it’s good advice, but ahahahahahahahaha I’ve never done this and I’m pretty sure I never will.

5. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Your writing is worth reading, and some things are out of your control, so just cut yourself some slack. Ahahahahahahahahaha fucking I’m such a piece of shit I don’t think I could do this if there was a gun to my head