Thank you for your contribution(s) in our MFGG Isometric Collaboration: Happy WAH-loween! Check out the final results of our collab here: https://forums.mfgg.net/showthread.php?tid=46
12/21/2017 at 11:36 AM KFC Badge
Transferring Willsaber's badges from phpBB boards
12/21/2017 at 11:36 AM MFGG Awards 2015 Winner
Transferring Willsaber's badges from phpBB boards
12/21/2017 at 11:36 AM Minigame Comp Runner-Up
Transferring Willsaber's badges from phpBB boards
1/9/2018 at 02:27 PM Minigame Comp Top 5
Congratulations on placing among the top five in Minigame Competition #6: Spacebar.
Over the past two years, there have been many community-driven attempts to reform this site. Members have expressed concerns regarding the moderation, quality control, advertising, interface design, community zeitgeist, and broader site exposure... all in an effort to improve Mario Fan Games Galaxy in some way. I am not writing one of those threads. I am unveiling the ugly part of MFGG. The part that nobody noticed, or everybody ignored. The part that is too fundamental to truly fix, because doing so would, in many cases, be unfair, unreasonable, or otherwise unethical. An observant member of this community cannot blame any part of the administration or community for this platform's gradual decline in activity, because doing so misses the greater issues that keep cycling members out, and prevent fresh blood from cycling in.
Mario Fan Games Galaxy does not attract the people it needs to solve its underlying problems (at least not in sufficient volume), and so long as it continues being MFGG, it never will. Because MFGG is a fangaming community, the only developers it attracts are fangamers -- and as somebody who has spent a great amount of time exploring a diverse range of gaming communities, I can confidently assert that fangame developers are just about the worst breed of gamedevs out there.
Typical game designers' creative process can be abstracted into two steps:
1) They consider what ideas they wish to express through their design.
2) They consider how they can efficiently construct a game design to propagate those ideas.
Fangamers, on the other hand, usually think with this logic:
1) They consider what ideas they wish to express through their design.
2) They consider how they can express those ideas within the design constraints of their source material.
... because fangamers are extremely derivative. There are some exceptions (@smbmaster99 is a blessing to Pokemon), but the vast majority are interested only in producing more of Mario. More of Pokemon. More of Zelda. They don't want to utilize our lovely interactive medium to express any design remarkably individual. They just want to use Super Mario Bros. as a platform to express their narrative ideas, or their aesthetic ideas, or occasionally their conventionally subversive ideas. Plenty of cynical critics complain that fangames are derivative in order to make game development easier for noobs, but I personally see value in the "Yes, AND" mentality.
One of MFGG's most notable productions is Super Mario Bros. Dimensions, by LangtonLion64. This game is an evolutionary innovation of Super Mario Bros. 3, and while far from an excellent game, it exemplifies the potential that fangaming can contribute to the greater gaming fandom. But that's not enough for most people. Most game developers with substantial ambition don't want to improve what they've already played, they want to aggregate their own creative ideas and coalesce something inherently more novel than the individual components. Fangamers at large do not -- and I am convinced will never -- display this mentality.
So, no matter how much exposure MFGG gets to the greater Nintendo and gaming fandoms, the majority of this community's target demographic (game developers) will find themselves dissuaded by their more derivative peers in most fangaming communities.
Fanfiction communities circumvent this issue almost entirely. Some people (those who know nothing) complain that fanfiction is similarly derivative, but it's derivative in a completely different way. Fanfiction holds the capacity to develop and subvert existing ideas, much like fangaming, but without copying the style of its source material. Super Mario Bros. Dimensions is not only about Mario, but it also looks and feels almost exactly like Super Mario Bros. 3. Metropolitan Man, despite being about Super Man, looks and feels wholly original. Most fanfiction is derived from source material beyond literature, so the medium fanfiction necessitates that the artist craft their own literary style. A My Little Pony fanfiction will never feel quite the same as Friendship is Magic, even when both pertain to the same subject. However, a Mario fangame of substantial scope on MFGG always feels very similar to Mario.
This community seems only proficient in finishing ambitious projects when they're 2D sidescrolling platformers with an emphasis on jumping to overcome enemies: Abducted Toad, Midas Machine, Psycho Waluigi, Toadette Strikes, Super Mario Bros. Dimensions, etc. Most of those are fine games, but they're all essentially Mario in terms of aesthetic and game design. There are deviations, but none too innovative ever come into fruition. And this community of fangamers is doing nothing to disincentivize itself. And it never will, because it sees no reason to challenge itself.
Who is MFGG currently comprised of? Which active members are influencing the whole? Certainly not I. Certainly no longer Mit, or Syaxamaphone, or Mors, or Neweegee, or Random.Nick... because all of us have better things going on. I don't know all of those people I listed very well, but I've conversed with each of them at least enough to know they all desire a meaningful role in the indie gaming industry. Because we have that ambition, we work towards it, and quickly mature beyond the rest of MFGG... and leave for greener and more challenging pastures. I'm only 18 years old, but nearly every game project I've worked on the past two years has been relatively original for this platform (the exception being Everything Mario Maker). My current focus, that I spend no less than 5 hours each day working on, is incomparably more innovative than what MFGG has so far produced (not that it's a particularly high bar).
Nobody has yet managed to be a professional fangame developer. UndyingNephalim is probably the closest, but even his Patreon is merely a secondary source of income. Yes, he is close to getting fangaming to be a full-time job, but he's definitely not there yet.
You look at other fanwork disciplines such as fanfiction or fanmusic. If you have a diverse range of interests (which many MFGGers sadly lack), then you can probably think of at least a handful of fan artists earning living wages from their content creation. Matthew Gafford's literal full time job is producing A Fox in Space, and fandom-based YouTubers like DigiBro earn living wages just by discussing fandom regularly. All of these artists sustain themselves by producing largely original fanwork, but fangaming won't. Fangaming has no ambition, because nobody who makes fangames has ambition.
I'm refraining from disparaging any specific users in this thread, but please consider: what have active MFGGers really accomplished in the past 365 days? How many of them want to be professional game developers? How many of them have produced games remarkable by the standards of broader communities? If you ask me: zero. Spend a little time experiencing the zeitgeist of The Indie Game Source, and try disagreeing with me. Four years ago, MFGG challenged me -- as a child -- but I don't think even children can still benefit from exposure to this community anymore. Everybody who helped me mature has transcended, and the only remnants I see are those who have so far failed to transcend with them. Inevitably, they will either mature as game developers or just lose interest in their mere hobby altogether.
MFGG just has nothing to offer new community members. Besides what I've already mentioned, modern MFGGers lack the expertise to properly critique others' content, and there aren't enough active members anymore to reliably recruit a team. There's an awesome compilation of graphics resource on the Mainsite, but they are tagged inconsistently, so finding useful assets is tedious. The community resources (members with expertise and an urge to teach) are depleted, and this site will never acquire new ones.
What does this community, which largely forgot how to draw pixel art (everybody with aesthetic expertise already left, except for StrikeForcer), won't encourage innovation (fangamers very rarely do), and fails to consistently produce innovative games offer prospective game developers? If you ask me: nothing.