Make MFGG More Wonderful

[VinnyVideo]

Click here!

We're looking for ways to make MFGG an even more wonderful place - and we need your help! Make MFGG More Wonderful is a survey that should take less than five minutes to complete. Please share your honest feedback - this is how we make MFGG better for everyone.

Whether it's suggesting a new feature, reporting a technical problem, or sharing your thoughts on the staff and community, your comments are extremely valuable and will be considered as we plan cool new things for 2024. Even if you mention something that's outside of the staff's control (for example, "I have a full-time job and don't have time to check the mainsite regularly" or "my Internet is unstable and makes the MFGG Discord hard to use"), it's still helpful for us to know how you use MFGG.

Surveys are anonymous and can't be connected to your MFGG username, e-mail address, Discord ID, IP address, or location. Please don't submit this survey more than once - this isn't a popular vote, and joke submissions will be removed.

In the unlikely event that Google Forms isn't working properly for you, shoot me a PM here or on Discord and I'll make sure your voice is heard.

The survey will close on December 31, 2023. We look forward to hearing from you!

[VinnyVideo]

Don't forget - you've still got 11 days to fill out this survey! I'd love to get a few more responses.

Course clear! You got a card.

[VinnyVideo]

Yes, I know it's taken an eternity to provide a summary of the survey responses. We've had a lot of events going on in January, and I didn't want bumping this topic to distract from a more exciting event like MFGG Awards. It's also possible I spent too much time playing really random old games on the 3DS I finally bought.

We got 13 responses from the survey. One might be a duplicate. I was hoping we'd get more responses, since previous surveys got more interest. Still, I really appreciate everyone who took the time to share their thoughts.

We got responses from nine different countries, which is an impressive level of diversity if you stop and think about it! Not surprisingly, the United States had more responses than any other country, but with just three American responses, it was far from a landslide.

Because of the small sample size, I'm not sure how meaningful a conclusion we can draw from the "how often do you visit different parts of MFGG" questions. I thought it would be more interesting to focus on the more qualitative questions.

Favorite thing about MFGG
Of the 12 responses in this category, eight of them mentioned fangames. That's a good thing! That's why we exist, after all. People also mentioned sprites, art, and community, which are also good things to like about MFGG.

Mainsite
Most of the people who filled out the survey seem pretty happy with the mainsite, but since the site runs on rather old code, there's definitely room for improvement here.

Two different people complained about our search functionality being rather clunky. I can't argue with that - the search feature could be improved upon. I'd update it if I could, but that might be a little beyond my meager PHP skills. If anyone wants to help, though, be my guest.

Some other suggestions

• Add tags: A good suggestion that ties in to the above search issues
  
• More active QC moderators: We recently added two more, and the queue is running much more smoothly now!
  
• Make the site less Windows-centric: Something I'm working on!
  
• Make queued submissions viewable: I don't think it makes sense to make other users' queued submissions publicly visible, unless I'm misunderstanding this suggestion
  
• A generator of game ideas: That would be interesting to see
  
• Game design tutorials: We have a lot of those, but we don't get a lot of those nowadays - I don't see one newer than 2021
  

Forums
It won't surprise anyone what the main complaint is here - they aren't very active! Six of the 11 users who wrote something here mentioned the forums' activity - or lack thereof.

I hope that having more events and competitions will help stimulate activity on the forums. They're not exactly hopping, but we've made progress since last year, when one month had a grand total of four posts!

Someone suggested putting tutorials on the forums. There's nothing stopping people from sharing tutorials and game design advice on the forums, and if there's anything that can be done to make the forums more conducive to that purpose, please speak up!

Discord
A couple of people suggested making moderation a bit stricter - maybe keeping a closer eye on who's hanging out and making sure they're a positive influence.

Someone (it could've been me, the person who forgets the Discord exists) says we should make sure usernames are visible on both light themes and dark themes, since lime green text on a light background is bad news for readability.

Events
Two people mentioned MFGG Awards. I think this year's awards turned out pretty well, and I hope we get back into the groove of doing them every year!

Two people also mentioned doing a new Community Fangame Project, and two other people mentioned doing more Game Jams.

Plus a few other things, including some we've done recently:

• Christmas Tree/Secret Santa
  
• Drawing Competition
  
• Gaming Tournament
  
• GOTM Revival
  
• Iso Collab
  
• Mario vs. the World
  
• Minigame Competition
  
• A Pixel Art Competition where you make a mockup of a simulated game
  
• Sprite Competition
  
• A tutorial-making event
  
• Themed competitions based on anniversaries or birthdays (for example, a Super Show-themed drawing comp if it was Lou Albano's birthday)
  

A couple of people said they wanted to see more events but didn't have any specific suggestions. And two people said they weren't interested in events. We hope you'd enjoy at least one or two of the events this year, but if you don't, thanks for being frank!

Finally, someone suggested partnering with other sites that host big fangame projects, since some high-quality individual games have established communities of their own. This is a good idea, and it's an opportunity that MFGG has never been very good at exploring.

Favorite Mario Game
And last but not least, I wanted to settle the question of which official Mario game is the most-loved here!

It might not be a surprise that Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Super Mario World were the winners here. Wonder is the newest and shiniest thing, a game that's gotten some very positive reviews, while SMB3 and SMW have been especially influential games for fangame makers over the years.

New Super Mario Bros. DS, Paper Mario 64, Super Mario Maker 2, and Super Mario Sunshine all got a nomination as well.

In closing...
So what does all this mean? I'm honestly not sure!

Most people seem pretty happy with MFGG as it is, but there's always room for improvement.

I like to think that we have a little more momentum and activity than a year ago. I think keeping our most fundamental process - the mainsite queue - running smoothly will help a lot. While I don't do too much with MFGG anymore, I hope my not-very-secret secret project will help breathe some new life into the mainsite. And I hope we can attract positive new activity to every part of MFGG.

Thanks again for sharing your feedback - it's very helpful, and I'm grateful to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts. If you have any other ideas for making MFGG a better place, please speak up! The Suggestions forum and the #mfgg-feedback channel on the Discord are two great places for doing such things, and you can always send a forum PM or a Discord message to your favorite staff member if there's something you'd like to discuss privately.

Course clear! You got a card.

[Q-Nova]

I know this may be old news, but I'd like to say some things:

Make the site less Windows-centric: Something I'm working on!

Is this saying that the site should be mobile-friendly? Because I think non-Windows desktop computers (e.g. Linux) would be able to browse MFGG alright, unless if it's referring to the games, which are indeed pretty Windows-centric, mainly because of the dominance of Clickteam and GameMaker.

Make queued submissions viewable: I don't think it makes sense to make other users' queued submissions publicly visible, unless I'm misunderstanding this suggestion

I know VGMusic allowed you to view queued submissions, although I think it works there in part because the submissions are just MIDI files. Meanwhile, in MFGG, if submissions were publicly visible, someone could upload a game filled with malware and easily wreck hundreds of computers, or upload NSFW sprites. Not sure what the likelihood of that happening is, though.

A generator of game ideas: That would be interesting to see

Back in the phpBB era, Cap'n Coconuts made an awesome Mario fangame idea generator along with a crossover game equivalent. It's no longer up unfortunately, but I'd love to see someone bring it back, and maybe even make it part of the MFGG domain! I remember people (myself included) getting some surprisingly neat ideas from those generators.

Game design tutorials: We have a lot of those, but we don't get a lot of those nowadays - I don't see one newer than 2021

They might be referring to tutorials that are more in-depth and give you a step-by-step guide on how to do something, rather than just offer you a project file to look into. Might be something like what the tutorials the old YoYoGames Sandbox website had. RetroX's GML guide on MFGG is also a good example of that. Could also be tutorials on how to make a good game, like what the first tutorial in the aforementioned website is about (which is actually pretty well-written I must say), although I'm not sure how easy that would be to make considering the broadness of game design. Personally, I have trouble coming up with stuff to say in this forum's Game Design Discussion Thread. That might just be me, though.

I hope that having more events and competitions will help stimulate activity on the forums. They're not exactly hopping, but we've made progress since last year, when one month had a grand total of four posts!

I hope the events won't stop! You guys had them going for a while there, and activity on the forums was doing alright, but now it seems that events have come to a halt for the most part.

Someone suggested putting tutorials on the forums. There's nothing stopping people from sharing tutorials and game design advice on the forums, and if there's anything that can be done to make the forums more conducive to that purpose, please speak up!

I feel like one of the downsides of switching forum software and not migrating the posts is losing the tutorials and guides. The phpBB forum had plenty of good tutorials, such as Guinea's fangame FAQ, Cap'n Coconuts' review guide, and Mit's spriting dictionary. I guess one could just post them in this forum with the author credited, and maybe have some touch-ups. It doesn't hurt to have new tutorials, however, even if it's an already covered subject!

Iso Collab

It would be fun to do another one! The last one turned out pretty well, although I kinda wish it was bigger, with more tiles.

Mario vs. the World

I sometimes wonder when will this event come, assuming it will ever happen.

Themed competitions based on anniversaries or birthdays (for example, a Super Show-themed drawing comp if it was Lou Albano's birthday)

This sounds like an interesting idea. For example, we could've done a Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door-style competition this year, since it's the 20th anniversary of that game, not to mention the Switch remake came out pretty recently!

While I don't do too much with MFGG anymore, I hope my not-very-secret secret project will help breathe some new life into the mainsite.

Is this the browser game implementation you've done recently? Or do you have something else in the works?

Quillax Ship - Where you can download all of my cool, keen mods and super-marvelous fangames!

[VinnyVideo]

I've heard MyBB forums tend to deliver an inconsistent experience to people browsing on mobile phones. But yeah, I'd really like to see more games that work with platforms other than Windows. That's part of why I added HTML5 support to the mainsite, and why I'd love to see the mainsite support games for multiple GM exports.

Some of the old phpBB topics would be good to revamp or revisit!

I'd like to see MFGG find a good cadence for events and competitions. It's important for MFGG to do events regularly without them becoming too frequent.

Mors perished in an electrical fire, so we shouldn't hold our breath waiting for Mario vs. the World. We do have a New CFP underway, though!

And yeah, upgrading the mainsite to enable uploading HTML5 games was the main piece of my Not-Very-Secret Project.

Course clear! You got a card.