text:
We need more candidates for the 2021 election!
Game Development is currently having an election where we're looking for two new moderators - which means we need at least three candidates to have a competitive election. As of writing, we have only one candidate. This question is designed to act as a call to action as well as a place to discuss the election, the work of moderating this site and candidates you feel would be good to nominate in the election. While we don't have a way for you to nominate someone officially, people often underestimate the support they have from the community and need a bit of a nudge to consider nominating themselves.
So, here are some of the questions you could answer below:

Are you considering running in the election? If so, is there something holding you back; if not, why not?
Do you have any questions or concerns about what being a moderator means?
Who would you like to see running in the election?
For current moderators - what's the workload like (how much time does it take from your day) and what sorts of things do you do?

If we don't get sufficient nominees by 20:00 UTC on Monday the 26th, the election will be cancelled and we'll need to consider the next steps. The moderators here would really appreciate the additional help. What I can say as an outsider who has been a moderator on other sites in the past is that Game Development is generally a pretty chill site - there aren't a ton of flags that need handling and it doesn't seem like the sort of site where a huge investment of time is needed. The call for new mods is less due to the huge amount of work and more to wanting to share the work around the moderators and relieve some weight from the existing crew.
I would bet that if you are the sort of person who's here 3-5 days a week at least, being a moderator wouldn't change your participation in the site in a major way.

https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/122951/2021-game-development-moderator-election-chat

I noticed the shortage of candidates here, but unfortunately I haven't used this site enough for it to make sense to nominate myself :)

Are you considering running in the election? If so, is there something holding you back; if not, why not?

Since you ask:  I considered it.
I nominated myself for the 2013 election, and I'm right now wearing the T-shirt I got for trying.  The logo is so faded I can barely see it, but it means a lot to me.  I am apparently still №1 close and reopen reviewer despite my long inactivity, and I've helped clarify rules and organise site events in the past.  I'm probably qualified, experience-wise.
On the other hand, I've mostly felt like a solo janitor, rather than part of "the community".  I don't really know anybody here, and I've felt out of place in the chatroom the times I've tried visiting.  I take these as signs that I would not make the best representative.  In 2013 I tried for it anyway, figuring I loved the site enough that I could make it work regardless.  I didn't get the position, but continued to do what I could to keep the site tidy.
Then Stack Exchange (the company) made a bunch of user-hostile decisions in 2019–20, like retroactively changing the user content license without users' consent, and throwing a bunch of good long-time moderators under the bus in various ways.  It made me feel like I'm just being used, with how sparse and uncaring the explanations were.  Since then, I haven't participated much.  I've been watching because I still care, but haven't found enough reasons to forgive, or time to forget.
Maybe someday.

I considered running and concluded being a mod would change my participation in ways I do not want.


text:
Congratulations DMGregory!
Our great friend DMGregory has reached 100,002 reputation! With 2.9~ million people reached and 2,279 answers, let’s give him a big round of applause! He’s been with Stack for over 7 years. Great job!
Answer with some of your favorite things he's done (jokes, problem-solving, shining wit, etc.)

Awww, thank you! I hope I've been useful to you!

Answer with some of your favorite things he's done

Definitely this:

It's all just been downhill from there.

I remember when DMGregory and I had an interesting conversation about aliens and what creatures can get into cars (we are in yellow):

But, I would say I was right, because if my dog can get into my car (I don't know how) then I'm pretty certain an alien could too.

I like your name change from 'noobprogrammer' to 'OKprogrammer' since that conversation.

Yep. I'm OK now, I suppose. ;)

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


text:
2021 Community Moderator Election Results
Game Development's fourth moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the two new moderators are:

They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.

Apologies for the delayed results - thanks for your patience.

Congratulations!

Congrats and welcome!

Congrats! See you around the Stack ;D

Congratulations Evorlor and Almo! Looking forward to working with you both!

Woohoo! Welcome to the team!

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Looking for volunteers to fix codeplex.com links
CodePlex archives will be shut down after July 1st 2021.
We still have a bunch of links to it.
I'm sure there is a bunch of projects that were hosted there are now hosted somewhere else, like on GitHub. The project page will often advertise as such.
If you folks have the time and want to have your edit count incremented, feel free to dig into those posts and update the links to the new project page, if there is one.
If the project has not been migrated, then I suppose it's safe to say that the project will not be migrated and the link will rot on July 1st, so the link should be removed.
...and if the link is removed and the post makes no sense without it, then vote to delete it and/or flag as no longer needed and/or flag for moderator attention so we can remove the post.

Thanks for flagging this and giving the community an opportunity to tackle it!

It seems some projects have not been migrated to GitHub, but there are forks/rewrites hosted on GitHub. What is the policy for these projects?

@Sacha Thanks for asking! Generally, links accompany a "way to solve an issue". If it's a fork/rewrite, presumably the port/rewrite will also help "solve the issue". So the link should be updated to the new fork/rewrite if it makes sense!

Wherever it's not too disruptive to the post you're editing, I'd say it would also be a good idea to note in the text that the link is now pointing to a fork/rewrite.


text:
Tag synonyms and "version specific" synonyms
Like user Polar asked 8 years ago, I too tried to propose a tag synonym for game-maker since I meet both the rep and the question score requirements. However, I get the error:

Failed to propose synonym:
Version specific synonyms can only be created by moderators

I want to suggest game-maker-studio-2 (11 questions) as a synonym of the main tag game-maker (420 questions). Reason is, GMS2 is just a new version of the engine, but that seems no different from merging unity5 questions in the main tag unity, or xna-4.0 into xna.
I think this is different from having separate tags for game-maker and game-maker-studio, because GMS1 and GMS2 are quite similar, and their differences involve only the actual engine implementation. On the other hand, pre-Studio versions (up to 8.1, I guess) are basically deprecated and no longer supported, thus we can expect nobody is going to ask a question about old, specific versions.
To sum up: GMS and GMS2 are different versions of the same software and basically expose the same functionalities. Since earlier versions are obsolete, we could merge everything into the game-maker main tag.

I don't mind doing something like this; I'm not familiar with this software so I'll wait until this post gets a couple upvotes before I do.

For folks who are familiar with this software: I'd appreciate if you could post an answer arguing why / why not merge these tags (or upvoting an answer you agree with). See this answer relating to Unity vs Unity 5 as an example. The extra information can help us ensure we're making a sound call here.

should game-maker-dnd also be a synonym?

@Evorlor I think nobody has ever used such tag, so there's no need to take it into account for the moment

Some will still ask questions on the old thing. We still get XNA questions. That's out of rotation since what, 2013?

I have proposed game-maker-studio-2 as a synonym for game-maker.
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/tags/game-maker/synonyms
(I also accidentally proposed game-maker-studio as a synonym. ♂)

We can accidentally downvote twice that tag and your blunder will be no more :P


text:
Should we try a community check-in on Meta?
The RPG SE has a yearly tradition of posting a community check-in in their meta.
As taken from their 2021 post:

We, the elected moderators, wanted to take a minute to check in and
see how the community feels things are going on the site.
This community check-in has been done for the last three years
(ignoring 2020), and it was very helpful. As such, we'd like to share
our thoughts and also get your feedback on what is going well and what
we could improve.

Is there interest trying a check-in for GDSE?
From what I understand, the check-in is intended to foster communication from all parts of the community so this question is directed both toward moderators & non-moderators.

Looks like your proposal has gained some interest. What do you think the next step should be?

@Vaillancourt The two take-aways I read are: 1) community is interested & 2) doesn't need to be mod driven. With that in mind, my thoughts were to post something similar to the RPG.SE check-in & see where it goes. Alternatively, we could do another meta post about how to shape the check-in, but for a first time I think it's better to put something together & learn as we go.

I think we could go ahead with the real thing too! I'm looking forward to read your next meta post!

This is a personal opinion, and I did not discuss an answer to this question with the other mods.

Yes, I think it would be an interesting exercise.

I'm posting another answer to not mess up with the votes of the "yes" answer because this one here is more like a comment than anything else. This is a personal opinion, and I did not discuss an answer to this question with the other mods.

A few things to note (emphasis mine):

We, the elected moderators, wanted to take a minute to check in and see how the community feels things are going on the site.

I have a small issue with this statement, as in this case, the proposal has been brought up by an active-non-mod-community member (Pikalek). Thus I don't think the effort needs to be necessarily lead by moderators, although if it is the wish of you or the community, I think we could lead the effort. (In any case, you'll get support from the moderators (I speak for myself, so it's at least one moderator :P).)
I think I tend to "just do what needs to be fixed" when I see it (e.g. I post stuff here on meta when I think something should be improved, batch update tags, etc.). I'm not doing this because I'm a mod, I have done this even before I was elected, I just do it because I'm a user of the site. So I don't think this would benefit me as a mod; I really see it as an opportunity for community members to get a ball rolling, moderator or not.

Speaking as an RPG.SE user: yeah, there's no particular reason this needs to be moderator driven. It just happens to be a tradition that was started and then maintained by moderators. :)

That makes sense!


text:
How is the community doing?
Based on some recent discussion on meta, this post is an experiment for our community to check in and have some semi-formal discussion about how things are going on the Game Development Stack Exchange. It's inspired by the yearly check-ins done on RPG.SE
A few key differences:

The RPG version happens to be moderator driven, this one is not. I'm a community member that saw a community building practice on another stack & thought we might find it helpful.
This is an experiment and may require some fine-tuning. Constructive feedback about the check-in is encouraged.

How this specific Q&A is run so that we get good value out of it
One clear premise per answer

I'll post a few things that I want to check in about. Please share your thoughts as well! Make sure and note whether you think the thing is an improvement, a problem, or some mix of the two (one person might see the same change as bad that you see as good, or vice versa)...

Post one kind of thing per answer, so that when people upvote/downvote based on whether they agree or not it's more clearly actionable - if you write an essay about 4 different things, it's not going to be clear what part(s) people agree or disagree with and thus it becomes unactionable. You can of course contribute multiple answers.

Upvote or downvote the answers based on your agreement with whether you see that thing happening and concur with the answer's premise that it's good or it's a problem. (In other words, if someone says "We get too many new users and I hate them," you would upvote if you agree, and downvote if either you don't think we get too many new users or if you don't hate them.)

No long comment threads

If you disagree with an answer, post your own answer, don't argue in comments. If you post more than one comment on an answer, you should consider if that is useful at all. We're interested in overall community sentiment as shown by votes, not so much that one person is so irritated they post 10 comments.

This isn't the place to workshop solutions - if a problem gets a lot of votes, we should open a new meta question to do justice to that issue. Solutions hidden in a comment thread on one of these questions are unable to be clearly vetted and voted on so they will tend to go undone.

As usual, Code of Conduct applies - Be Nice.
You may strongly disagree with other users or with the mods or whoever, but find ways to express what you like or don't like without being hostile or insulting to others. Focus on actions rather than characterizing people.
With that, let the experiment commence - feel free to contribute!

Sour comments are gone (mostly). (good)
I don't know what caused this exactly, but the amount of hate and sarcasm I see in comments has drastically decreased over the last years. (As a mod,) I rarely have to handle flags about rude stuff going on.
Keep on spreading the joy and the help folks ❤

We're slowly becoming a Unity Stack Exchange. (bad)
Data shows that the proportion of questions tagged with unity is increasing year after year. In fact, in 2019, half of the questions that were asked were tagged with unity. Last year, 53% of the questions posted were tagged with unity.
This trend suggests that Unity appears to be accessible and a nice tool to help developers make games or learn about game development (which is good, I suppose?).
Unfortunately, I feel like it kind of shows a false advertisement that if one wants help folks with their questions, they'll need to learn Unity if they want to get a chance to get rep; this could also suggest to newcomers that we're a Unity club and make them turn away because they have a question about something else.

I don't have anything against Unity, nor having folks asking and answering about this here, my only concern is about the lack of diversity this could be showing (although this probably reflects a global trend--Unity's taking over the world).
I know you hate to click on links so I'll reproduce here the results from the query above; these are the percentages of questions created that were tagged with *unity*:

2016
2017
2018
2019
2020

36
40
46
50
53

FWIW, we get less questions asked year after year in general on gamedev.se, so this means that the questions about something other than Unity are fewer and fewer year after year.

Updated in 2023: [Ratio of the Unity tag over years 2016-2022]

Strong response to fix codeplex links
I feel like the community stepped up to deal with the codeplex problem. There's still some work to be done, but initially I recall there being well over 300 links waiting to rot out. Furthermore, it's increasingly difficult to find salvageable entries in the problem list.
It was also encouraging to see some new avatars in the suggested edit review queue helping out - this wasn't solely handled by the usual suspects. I think this is something that turned out better than I had expected.

Concerns about community participation & the 2021 moderator election
I'm a little concerned that our most recent moderation election might indicate a decline in community participation. It took longer to get a sufficient number of candidates & the ballot count declined.
Some data:

2013 : 247 ballots for 9 candidates
2017 : 329 ballots for 5 candidates
2021 : 221 ballots for 3 candidates

I didn't see a way to get active user counts based on year, but I think it's probably safe to say that traffic has increased over time. The pandemic may have also played a role in this, but I think the decline is still a bit discouraging.

More data:

Election
Date
Voters eligible
Visited the site
Visited the election page
Voted

Percent eligible voted
Percent eligible visited
Percent visited site voted
Percent visited page voted

1
February 5 2011
455
?
102
58

13
?
?
57

2
June 25 2013
2161
740
441
247

11
34
33
56

3
November 7 2017
4163
1035
676
329

8
25
32
49

4
May 4 2021
6669
889
753
223

3
13
25
30

I've added more data to your post, based on the election pages (+ /3, /2, /1). I did not want to change your post so I rolled it back. You can use the data if you think it's useful.

@Vaillancourt Thanks! I did do the rollback, as I think it's useful context. I appreciate the effort you went through to dig it out & table it up. I had been only looking at the "view a summary report online" election results - your contribution was the sort of data I was hoping to include.

I knew the site had less active users, so I wanted to see if the lower ballot count matched the activity (in which case we could have concluded that there was not less interest in voting), but when comparing site activity with vote related activity, we see that indeed, we have had a lower interest in this election.

It's hard to find high-level questions
I enjoy algorithms, problem solving, and general game techniques that are applicable to a great many platforms and situations. GDSE seems to be predominantly “how do I get this very specific code to work” nowadays—questions which have little broad application, and are about implementation and not general principles—which I almost always can't help with.
I don't know if it's confirmation bias or not, but I found a lot of high-level questions early on. I got to write answers about:

Selling OpenGL games: Can I sell a game made with OpenGL?
Game speed: Should frame rate affect the speed in a game engine?
A method of procedural generation: How can I get textures on edge of walls like in Super Metroid and Aquaria?
Correct someone's vector transformations: How do you turn a cube into a sphere?

I really enjoy these kinds of questions! I get to learn a lot from the answers to them (including the answers that beat mine). I get to hone my own skills in creating answers for people—the “teaching is the best way to learn” effect I'm sure we're all familiar with.
As time went on I found it harder to find these, and mostly found just super specific debugging questions I couldn't do much about, and so I drifted away and didn't drift back. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy programming, but I don't much enjoy niche programming problems.
I don't know what kind of solution to offer to this situation, just that it's there for me. I'd really like a way to more easily find high-level problems that I can actually do stuff about.

New devs don't know how to debug their code and we don't have ways to tell them how they could do it (i.e. teach them to fish). (bad¬)
A lot of users ask questions about bugs that an experienced developer will spot by reading the code, but that the asker could have figured out if they had known relatively basic debugging techniques (such as using the step-by-step debugger of their IDE, or spamming stuff to their debug console).
I understand it's easy rep¤ for those who answer (good for them! ^_^), and it helps get the issues fixed for the ones asking, but I feel like we could help those new devs a bit further if we could direct them to guides or I-don't-know that would show them a few basic tips to help them get unstuck by themselves in the future.

¬ The bad part is about "we don't have ways to tell them how they could do it", and not about "New devs don't know how to debug their code". We've all been there.
¤ By "easy rep", I really mean "satisfaction of having helped someone".

Does the text for closing basic programming/debugging posts compound this problem? Pointing new users in the right direction with a comment addressing the problem is more welcoming than closing & saying "wrong stack, post on SO". But a comment doesn't seem like an adequate way to explain/teach inexperienced users general debugging skills.

I'm not sure this problem is covered by what you've linked in the image. That "ask on SO" close reason is about syntax errors and such, while the issue I'm trying to highlight here is more about "my code/logic doesn't work, it behaves like X while I'm expecting it to behave like Y". The most "convenient" way I though of so far to handle this would be to still answer the question and add something like "Note that this error would have been easy to spot if you had used a step-by-step debugger as explained [here]" either in the answer or as a comment. This could be discussed in another meta post.

Legal questions are still being asked (bad)
It's a fact of life that we get questions of the form "is it legal to do X?", and the numbers and frequency are quite low, but still high enough. The three main variants are:

Something that's definitely legal, but the OP might not be aware.
Something that's definitely illegal, typically involving breach of copyright law.
Some weird edge case or grey area.

For all three, the responses, typically in comments, are always along the lines of "i am not a lawyer, if you want legal advice engage with a qualified legal professional". We certainly can provide discussion and guidance around these questions, but is that even appropriate for a Q&A site?

I think game dev legal questions are fine and appropriate here actually. You ask if that's even appropriate for a Q&A site: RPG.SE allows legal questions about the RPG domain and they're fine and actually within our area of expertise because people who create and publish RPGs are well placed to know about the specific legal hurdles that face people who create and publish RPGs. (See: We are not lawyers. Why do we allow law topics?) Likewise, game devs are a group very well positioned to know about legal issues that face game devs.


text:
I saw a moderator active on a question that I thought was off-topic and they did not close it

I saw a moderator active on a question that I thought was off-topic and they did not close it... and it annoyed me. Mods should do the right thing, all the time, every time. Right?

A moderator not closing a question does not mean the question is on topic. If you feel the question is off-topic, vote to close it; it takes 3 votes¤ to close, whether a moderator edited, commented or answered it.
That quote above is something that crossed my mind several times before I became a moderator. Some questions that were obviously off-topic were commented on, edited and (even worse!) answered by a moderator.
That's okay to disagree. Mods votes are unilateral and sometimes we find that a question is borderline, so we don't vote to close. Or we only have time to do a small thing on it and don't have time to properly close it.
But that does not mean that we're always right. So, again, if you think it's off-topic, vote :)
That's the power you, the community, have.

¤ The site is still configured for 5 votes, but I generally close those that have at least three.


text:
Should we create Bedrock and Java edition specific tags for Minecraft questions?
I recently began writing highly detailed Q&A for creating add-ons in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition (here is the first one publicly available). With that in mind, there are a few more in the works surrounding more specific topics such as:

How can I create a custom item in my Minecraft: Bedrock Edition add-on?
How can I create a custom entity in my Minecraft: Bedrock Edition add-on?
How can I create a custom block in my Minecraft: Bedrock Edition add-on?

However, we currently only have the tags minecraft and minecraft-modding. My concern is that if these Q&A begin generating more questions related to Minecraft customization, it may be beneficial to have tags for the respective Java and Bedrock editions at a minimum since customizations between the two games are vastly different.

 The Modding Suffix
This related post examines the idea (that seems to have been approved) that tags surrounding the modification of games, should be something like gamename-modding:

I propose that we rename game-specific tags to have a "-modding" suffix, so we'd have skyrim-modding and the like.

With this however, if the community consensus is for the creation of the version specific tags, then how do we handle this going forward? Do we create a modding tag for each too, or, do we simply retain the minecraft-modding tag and that gets added to the question?

Should we create the tags minecraft-bedrock-edition and minecraft-java-edition to help separate questions in the future? If yes, should we retire the minecraft tag?

FWIW, since you posted both the Yes and No answers, and you can't vote on your own answers, you should write a comment on the answer that you think should be the way to go, so that your "vote" is taken into consideration in deciding the "consensus".

 Yes

My arguments for yes are mostly organizational. Having version specific tagging, at least for Minecraft, will help users find questions relevant to the version they're playing, improve search results, and, potentially reduce duplicates by increasing question visibility.
Another benefit is for clarity with concise question titles, for example, if I ask the question "How can I change the sound that plays when placing wooden blocks?", then the answer is slightly different between the two versions. In Java edition, this sound is "block.wood.place" but in Bedrock edition, its "sounds/step/wood1-6".
As an added note, from a technical aspect, Java and Bedrock editions are separate games.

I upvoted this because we currently have 229 questions with the minecraft-modding tag, so the volume of questions is significant, IMHO.

I have a question regarding "from a technical aspect, Java and Bedrock editions are separate games." and the way we've been using the minecraft-modding tag: does it even make sense to allow minecraft-modding questions if they do not specify which Edition they're about?

Should we create the tags minecraft-bedrock-edition and minecraft-java-edition to help separate questions in the future?

In the case we get a consensus on Yes, I think we should keep the tags in line with the other modding tags:

minecraft-bedrock-modding
minecraft-java-modding

If yes, should we retire the minecraft tag?

The minecraft tag is currently a synonym for the minecraft-modding tag.
So retiring one means retiring the other.
This is a complicated task as it requires to visit every question and update the tag, and will probably depend on the answer to the question

Does it even make sense to allow minecraft-modding questions if they do not specify which Edition they're about?

If it does not make sense to allow "minecraft-modding" questions, then I suppose we'll need to visit every question, update the tag if the text of the question makes it clear which edition it is about, and close the other questions as "needs details", then watch for anyone asking new questions about it and ask them to specify the edition (a bit like we do with unityscript) (that is, we will not add it to the "black list").
If it does make sense to still have questions about minecraft-modding without specifying the edition, then there is not really a need to worry about it.

 No

Creating additional tags isn't something (in my opinion) that should be done on a whim, but rather based on community demand. With focus on my earlier concerns, there's a big if. There's a possibility (and, it's a pretty good possibility) that traffic surrounding Minecraft customizations remains consistent with current trends. This isn't something that changes overnight, not even over the course of a month (without major influence), but rather over the course of a year or more. So, why create a tag now? Why not wait a while until we have an influx of questions that demonstrate a need for tags that separate the versions. In the same example given for my yes arguments, one could simply say that the title or question content should specify the version, given the absence of specific tags.

I could upvote this because we could probably get away with the appropirate search terms Java, Bedrock.


text:
"How to get started" is about a gamedev journey, not about doing something specific
I've noticed in the past few months that questions containing the words or the concept of "how to get started doing X" amass some close votes.
If we consider the paragraph of the community-specific reason for why we want to close the questions about "how to get started",

Questions about "how to get started," "what to learn next," or "which technology to use" are discussion-oriented questions which involve answers that are either based on opinion, or which are all equally valid. Those kinds of questions are outside the scope of this site. Visit our help centre for more information.

... we can see elements like:

what to learn next,
which technology to use,
discussion-oriented,
based on opinion,
are all equally valid. ¤

These pretty much all relate to the same topic: how can a developer begin their journey in game development.
They're not about "How do I do X where X is specific and scoped but it probably involves a longer-than-the-average-answer?"
If you know how a question could be answered, but it would require many tutorials to do so, then probably the question could be closed for "Needs more focus" (This question currently includes multiple questions in one. It should focus on one problem only.). If the answer could be answered using a single short tutorial, or that any way to tackle the issue asked should be done as a whole (e.g., consider a problem that requires two steps to solve, and step 2 requires step 1 be done in a very specific way), then it should be left open.
Remember that someone else would love to write "more involved" answers to those questions. They do not harm the site, on the contrary. Remember that it's not because one thinks that an answer would be too long to write that it would be the case for another user; one doesn't have to choose between "I can answer it" and "vote to close,” it's also possible to:

edit it and leave a meaningful edit comment,
comment and suggest improvements or request for clarifications,
downvote it (e.g., if not enough research effort is demonstrated),
leave it alone.

If the question does not fit the description of the other close reasons (as it's outlined here), and you're not sure enough about the topic, then maybe it should be left open.
So requesting tutorial-like answers is not outright off-topic, although the user asking has to consider that they could be asking for a lot and so no one will give them an answer (... they should also show that they have done some research before asking).
Finally, keep in mind the way new users receive feedback when asking a question on the site:

they don't see close votes until their question is closed,
they see downvotes but may not "get the message" as they may not be aware that there is a description over the down arrow, and the down arrow has currently three reasons given for using it,
they can read and understand clear and friendly comments, and they can respond to them, making comments the most effective way to help them improve their question.

We have had past posts about this topic:

A Close Vote is not a Super Downvote - user1430 covers this very well, it is a "recommended reading.”
“how to get started making a game” faq link

¤ A side note about "are all equally valid": in computer science/programming, there are often multiple ways to achieve the same goal, and, often, those ways are all equally valid, so of course, to some extent, we expect those. The text here really refers to opinions; the reasons why your favourite colour is Milk and Water are equally valid to your neighbour's reasons to love Goose Turd Green.

I think it's time to reword that close vote reason to highlight this as it's not the first time it's been brought up in meta.

Regarding rewording the close reason, would it be worthwhile to frame this post (or create a new Meta post) as "How to reduce temptation to misuse 'how to get started' close reason"? Then answers can propose ways to rephrase the reason, or alternative measures to try.

Yes, we could reword this post in such a way that we get a better way to phrase the reason. There are some "requirements" for close vote reason texts, so I'll be back tomorrow morning with what we need.

The person who downvoted should propose an alternative to this (it's okay to disagree, and if the community wants to change this, then so be it).

I'm the second downvoter, based specifically on this recent question, which I believe is entirely appropriate for closure as a "how to get started" question with the wording and criteria as they currently stand: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/195296/how-to-use-direct-x-12-in-c

@MaximusMinimus that one fits in the category of "how to get started", and so it should be closed.

In fact, it's "needs more focus".

Is the central claim that there's been a trend of "how do I get started" being used to close questions that are on-topic or that "how do I get started" is being used to close questions that should be closed for other reasons?

@Pikalek I would say both. The fact that a question is closed for the wrong reason is "not that bad" per se, but it could be sending a misleading message to the one who asked it.

I agree that simply including the phrase "how do I get started" (or equivalent) isn't grounds for closing. Revising the help to reflect that sounds reasonable.
I agree with the logic that using the wrong reason to close a question can be misleading. To the extent that the question is a reminder to close for the most appropriate reason, I can get behind that.
I'm uncertain of the claim that there's been a months long trend of "how do I get started" being used to close questions that are on-topic. I haven't seen corresponding activity on meta or the reopen queue. This is the only question that comes to mind. I saw a peak of 2 close votes on it & it is currently down to 1. In the interest of transparency, I voted to close on that one.
Appropriate specificity and scope are valid considerations, but they are also subjective. I think it's fine to use them if we also realize there will be some variety in how they are interpreted.
The observation about low rep users being unable to see close votes was helpful to me. I don't recall not being able to see them & I honestly had lost sight of that. Occasionally I wondered why bad questions don't course correct more often. In some cases they can't see the problem & it's good to remember the need for clear communication.

To your point that you haven't seen many on-topic questions erroneously closed as "How to get started", I think a big part of that is that we somewhat rarely get the critical mass of votes needed to close the question at all. So the issue being pointed out here isn't so much that we're closing questions that should stay open, but that questions are accumulating close votes for misleading reasons (whether or not those votes actually stack up enough to cause closure)

@DMGregory I asked about that specifically in the comments & answered in the context of the response.

A thing to note here, is that I did apply the "policy" about closing the question once they had three close votes, as I mentioned in the past. Users don't typically try to appeal in Meta, or come back and edit so that their question pops on the reopen queue (unfortunately).

I'm not able to provide hard evidence about this, and when I mention "I've noticed in the past few months that questions [...]", the "past few months" refers to when I've noticed it, not when it started to occur. I'm not accusing anyone here, I've had that "mentality" too.

I would not mind updating both close reasons text, the only issue with that is that we can edit only the "Site specific" close reasons, not the other reasons, this means that we're stuck with the text for the "Needs more focus" reason. Our options include: demonstrating and asking the CMs to allow one more "site specific" reason (this includes showing that all of our three current reasons are used and necessary); replace one of the site specific reason by a new reason to close; or reword one or more of the three reasons we have now to cover more ground.

@Vaillancourt I knew we only had one custom close reason, but didn't realize the wording & guidance of the other reasons were locked in. In light of that, I've removed that part of my response.

Here is one question with a close as "how to get started".


text:
DirectX tag synonyms inconsistency
While browsing the main tag synonyms list, I bumped into something quite odd: directx, directx9, directx10, and directx11 are target tags, and tags such as direct3d10 are mapped accordingly. On the other hand, it seems that directx12 is a synonym for direct3d12, which is the target tag instead:

I'm currently not sure if this occurred with other tags as well. Shall this be fixed, or isn't it worth the effort?

I think knowing this will annoy a bunch of users from now on if we don't do something about it :p

I have updated the tag synonyms.


text:
Show us your in-development game! - Gamdev's Septemberbash 2021 Showcase!
The vacation season is coming to an end, and while it has been a moment to rest and have a good time with the ones we love, it has also been a good time for some of you to work hard on your next game.
Here we're proposing that you show us what you've been working on recently toward making your next game!
You can share with us

What's the most recent feature you've got in?
What are you the most proud of so far?
What's been the hardest part to do so far, why, and how did you managed to get over it?
What part do you think will be the hardest to complete in the near future?
What's a cool trick or solution you found that others might find useful?

Your game is eligible if:

It is a work in progress, meaning either an unreleased game, or an update/extension/DLC in development for a released game.
It is SFW (Safe-for-Work)
Its content respects the StackExchange Code of Conduct and Acceptable Use Policy, including but not limited to...

No bigotry.
We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. Use stated pronouns (when known). When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.

No harassment.
This includes, but isn’t limited to: bullying, intimidation, vulgar language, direct or indirect threats, sexually suggestive remarks, patterns of inappropriate social contact, and sustained disruptions of discussion.

Sexually Explicit Material. Accounts that use Stack Exchange to post sexually explicit or pornographic material, or links to it, will be suspended.
If you think the content of the game is not safe for everyone, please make sure you add a warning notice to your answer, something like an ESRB content descriptor.

Rules for posting answers:

You must have asked at least one question, or provided at least one answer on the main site between September 1st 2020 and September 1st 2021.
One game per answer
Introduce your game first
You can link to your game's site or Steam/App Store page, but the answer can't be a link only one: please tell us about your work!
The links you provide must link directly to the game site, it must not be a "short link" such as bit.ly, or include some kind of redirection.
Submissions will close after September 30th

Love this idea! Thanks for getting this going!

There was another post here, where did it go? too bad I dont have 10k rep to see for myself

@Kromster Looks like you'll need to keep on the good work here to find out ;)

The submission period has ended. Thanks all for the interest shown!

My game is Knights Province - it is an RTS set in middle ages. Think "Settlers 4" or "Stronghold" or "Knights and Merchants". Previous stable Alpha 11.3 is available at game's website. Newer builds and discussion are on Discord.

Recently I've been working towards releasing a new big Alpha version. Each new Alpha has several big features and a lot of minor improvements.

What's the most recent feature you've got in?
That will be sheep farms and pastures. It is a new kind of a building in the game that needs an enclosed area next to it (pasture) where sheep will graze and grow and produce wool. This feature has several aspects to it:

Makes the town look more alive with cute little sheeplings
It's a mini-planning challenge for a player to place the pasture
Adds variety to town-building

What are you the most proud of so far?
Offtopic: that the game is coming out good enough to be actually played :-D

What's been the hardest part to do so far, why, and how did you managed to get over it?
I would say it was 2 things:

Less technical hard part was to come up with and lay out the game mechanics and players UI (in a broad way) of the feature. What player should do, what can go wrong, what is not intuitive and how can it be worked around. Playtesting is the key to the solution here. If it does not feel right or fun - it should be changed.
More technical hard part was with the scope of the feature - one word "pastures" immediately brings in the fences, more detailed object picking, more complicated pathfinding, attackable and destroyable fences, fence selection in UI and cherry on top - "teaching" AI how to build and handle them. (Related question - How to maximize enclosed area and minimize perimeter on a grid with obstacles? ). A lot of code had to be refactored and added. Decomposition was the key - everything had to be split into manageable parts and each one be well isolated, so that parts could be solved one at a time and if needed, "stubbed" until solved (replaced with a hardcode).

What part do you think will be the hardest to complete in the near future?
As of right now, the gameplay and feel of the feature is kind of "okay". The hardest part will be making it more fun to play with. Also the diminishing returns - each new small improvement in fun/technical aspect will require more and more work. Keeping motivated is definitely needed for that!

What's a cool trick or solution you found that others might find useful?
When you have mocked up and prototyped the feature and it starts to look like it is going to stay - spend time on making its debug displays and outputs, so that you can track its every little detail. The more complex the mechanics are, the more help from "inside the black box" you will need later on to efficiently work on them.

Thanks for sharing this with us! I'm not sure I understand what you mean by your last paragraph? Do you mean that debugging those features is more complex and don't get solved by adding debug related graphics widgets and such?

@Vaillancourt thanks for the feedback! I have tried to reword it.

Ah, I understand now, thanks for clarifying :) Good luck with the next steps!

I haven't named mine yet - for now it's just a "3D Game". It will focus on exploring and fighting through procedurally generated worlds with traditional RPG like might-and-magic mechanics. It is intended to be single player, although I am considering possibility of some kind of very limited local multuplayer, or at the very least AI companions to team up with for the harder battles.
A lot of design decisions are influenced by existing games, such as WoW or Minecraft or Hellgate London (the old one).
It is all on GitHub, I haven't put a license yet, but I mean for it to be open source so others can learn from it or come up with improvements. The code (and some outdated screenshots) can be seen at https://github.com/htmlcoderexe/3DGame.
I am currently working on item generation - there is some stuff I haven't committed yet, but the most recent committed thing involves generalising item "types" - I am trying to have it as data driven as possible. Character classes and abilities are already completely separate from actual code (although ability effect components are still hardcoded, I do not think this is avoidable, they are more like opcodes anyway). Now I also have items in broad categories (three classes of armour, accessories, ranged/melee/magic weapons etc), while actual item "types" are then used in game. These types decide the stats of the finished item based on its level, as well as its equipment slot, and description in the ingame view.
For example, a "Poleaxe" is a Melee weapon, with [some amount of] Physical Attack added per level. It equips into the Weapon slot and can have either of these three icons.
I actually used to have those hardcoded enums and arrays of stat growth and names and all bunch of stuff per equipment type - now it's all in a file somewhere, easily editable.
I think related to this is the actual editor app that I made - it's somewhat similar to the "Game Editor" window from RPGMaker, with all the different tabs for stuff. I now have a working tab for editing the character classes, with editable ability trees, another one for abilities, and now also the item types. It is using Windows Forms, I should probably move on from that, the GUI code is very annoying to manage, although #regions help a lot. Here it is in action:
Class editor with skill tree:

Selecting prerequisite skills:

The red lines are going to be fancy little arrows in the actual game, but at the moment the skill tree displays as is in there.
Another cool thing I did was a special kind of GUI tinting that only targets grayscale, which makes it almost like a rich colour palette swap. I use this extensively in drawing all the randomly generated item icons. I have done a small writeup here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/6bze8v/improved_spritebatch_tinting_for_monogame_or_xna/
I actually have an entire GUI system with a window manager, windows, controls, text input, events and dialogue boxes. I have been able to "rip it out" and successfully put it into another game project with minimal adjustments.
The hardest things so far are graphics, hands down. This is using the MonoGame framework (started out as XNA), and there is a lot of code that is needed to make the basics happen. I have my own models, terrain etc, even animation and billboards - I really have to thank Riemer and his tutorials from eons ago to get me started on the whole thing. I still have a lot to do to make it go smoothly (I rather inefficiently have a big Model instance for every single object that's out there at the moment, no particle pool and my animations don't slerp which means ugliness unless each rotation is like 10+ fps matrices).
Getting the terrain chunking right was definitely a pain too - both working with the special data type I created for the purpose that defines every position (a Vector3 for fine float coordinates and a pair of integers for chunk coordinates) as well as making generation align. Now it is mostly working and is probably easily portable to another project - it even has its own very cheap collision detection - it simply interpolates the heightmap.
I am afraid that proper collision detection for everything else that is not terrain will be the hardest thing to implement, though. I am talking about things like dungeon walls and stairs and buildings and all that kind of stuff. I am delaying this until a while later because right now there are all these other things I should be fixing too - I feel that I should have something with more playable functionality before going for the marathon that implementing such collision would be.

Keep up the good work, thanks for sharing this with us!

I am happy to show this to others, I hope someone will find useful information or ideas from this.


text:
Postmortem for the event "Gamdev's Septemberbash 2021 Showcase!"
The recent event Gamdev's Septemberbash 2021 Showcase! came to an end after one month of being active.
We'd like to know a bit more how we can improve this event in the future.

What did you like about it?
What did you dislike about it?
What could be done better next time?
Any other thoughts about it?

Please phrase your answer(s) in a way that makes it clear why folks would upvote or downvote it.

I think this is a great idea. It provides an outlet for people to promote their work so they don't get tempted to try to do it on the main page and earn a bunch of downvotes and spam-flags for self-promotion (not that much of a problem, but it happens occasionally). I also find it interesting to see what the other members of the community work on.
But I, for one, did not even notice this until it was over. I guess I am not the only one, considering that it only received 3 entries (one of them self-deleted by the author for reasons they kept to themselves). So advertising this better might help.
Although I would not have participated anyway that month, because I couldn't think of anything I did during that timeframe which would be worth showing off. I am a hobbyist game developer and I am currently "between projects".

Thanks for the answer; "So advertising this better might help." Do you have suggestions to improve this? We used the "event" site feature and so a link to the event post was posted there for a whole month. This might not be as visible for mobile users as it is for desktop users.

The event is here again ;)


text:
Is this question about languages & architectures appropriate for Gamedev SE?
After discovering Dialog, I have become enamored with the idea of writing text games in logic languages. Unfortunately, Dialog has some key limitations that makes me think twice about starting a large project in it: mutable facts can only be unary or binary, there is no/little support for FFI, and objects cannot be instantiated at runtime. While these problems can be worked around, it starts to defeat the purpose of using a DSL - not to mention the runtime costs of everything but hacking in an FFI.
Being passingly familiar with logic languages in general, I looked towards Prolog to see if it would be suitable and found that there is little support for mutability in most logic languages. One either passes around the world state (potentially slow) as a parameter, or uses the incredibly dangerous assert*/retract family. With a bit of imagination, I can envision perhaps some system that assembles prolog/datalog databases dynamically, or translates queries to SQL, but this is well beyond what I am familiar with.
Being out of my depth, I'm hoping I can ask around for some advice; Gamedev SE seems like an appropriate place to ask in lieu of the strangely hostile StackOverflow. If this isn't the right place, would anyone know of somewhere more suitable?
Further Info:
To clarify why I think Dialog is inappropriate, I will examine the workarounds that I know/can think of. For the limited arity of facts, you have the macro facility which allows you to bundle facts like so:
@($Obj is $Rel $Parent)
    *($Obj has relation $Rel)
    *($Obj has parent $Parent)

You may notice that this macro only works if $Obj has only one relation (mutable facts are deterministic). This can be worked around by interpreting some datastructure composed of lists, but will miss out on optimization by the compiler. Similarly, you could enumerate these composite facts with IDs, but I also anticipate performance issues there.
@($Obj is $Rel $Parent ! $ID)
    *($ID has object $Obj)
    *($ID has relation $Rel)
    *($ID has parent $Parent)

For dynamic object creation, you can apply a similar tactic of assigning unique IDs to objects and tracking them with lists, but this again frustrates the compiler's optimization which is built around the object datatype (IIUC).
(new $Class is $ID)
    (there are $N instances)
    (world objects $Objs)
    (now) (world objects [$Class | $Objs])
    ($N + 1 is $ID)
    (now) (there are $ID instances)

I'm not one of the mods, but I think asking questions about using Dialog to design a text game is perfectly fine for this site. You'd obviously have to keep them narrow and answerable, i.e. instead of generally asking how to design games in Dialog you could ask "How to work around [x] problem in Dialog?" and so on, but otherwise I see no issue. I hope you find a way to make this game, Dialog and Prolog are very interesting and unusual language choices for game-making - in college I had to put together a game purely in Racket, which was an equally tricky task.

I am a bit unclear on your question.
Are you asking for library recommendations?  If so, that is out of scope on this site.  I would recommend softwarerecs.stackexchange.com or gamedev.net Discord for questions like that.
Are you asking about the pros and cons of specific tools?  If so, that can be suitable for this site, as long as it isn't too vague.  Be sure to specify your use case so we can best advise.

I'll confess I'm also a bit unclear on the question and what a good answer should include. I think it would be beneficial to walk through a gameplay scenario in the question, "I want to be able to author a sequence of interactions in a text game that plays out like this..." and "I want the authoring process to have these attributes..." concluding "...what is a way I can achieve that gameplay outcome, while meeting my goals for the authoring workflow?"

Language, library - any framework that lets me efficiently express the game logic using the logic programming paradigm is fine by me. I just want to make games, in the end. Software Recs SE looks like a good place to ask, thanks. Do programming paradigms and sweeping architectural decisions count as "specific tools"? E.g., ECS vs. traditional OOP as an obvious one or Prolog vs Dialog perhaps as applicable to the question?

@DMGregory Are you suggesting these questions as meta questions for me to answer to clarify this particular meta question, or as proposals for questions to ask on the regular website (is there a term for it?)? If it's the latter, then that's amazing! I only take issue with these constraints because I want to express things like procedural generation and object graphs (rather than trees). A concern, though, would be whether I would need to specify that this is in Dialog specifically, or would I be free to leave the framework to the answerer?

I was thinking about what would be needed to make it an answerable question for the main site. If it boils down to "what library should I use" or "should I prefer ECS or OOP" then those wouldn't be on-topic for this site. But if you want advice about how to write code to achieve a specific goal then I think that's on-topic for the main site. Just be sure to give us some good concrete examples of the kinds of procgen / object graph problems you need to solve, so we can come up with solutions that meet those needs.

Sorry, @Evorlor, I forgot to mention that the framework need not be implemented. I'd also be happy implementing it myself if there was a convincing argument for its design and enough information for an idiot like me to cobble it together. Hence why I titled the question "architecture". Sorry it ended up being so unclear.

@DMGregory Then, if I am understanding you correctly, I could ask "What's the most efficient way to express mutable game state in the logic paradigm?", leaving the language/framework to the answerer? So long as I clearly define what the game state constitutes and what mutability and efficiency mean in this context?

"Most efficient" sounds like an optimization problem. Sadly in gamedev we usually don't have proofs of optimality. I'd ask for a strategy to achieve the kinds of gameplay outcomes you have in mind, and accept that the proposals you get might not be THE most efficient, just something that works. We can use votes to highlight ones that seem to be more efficient than others.

@DMGregory That makes sense. Thank you, this has clarified a lot for me!


text:
Can/should we rename [bsp] to [binary-space-partitioning] (with an alias)?
We currently have a mainsite tag of bsp, which until today has had a tag description of simply "Binary space partitioning".
Could we rename this to binary-space-partitioning and keep bsp as an alias?
Maybe there's a good reason not to do this, like SEO, since we could've gone with this name the whole time it's been here but didn't (it exactly fits the old tag name length limit of 25 characters), but maybe that's just a matter of nobody asking to rename it. :P

¯`·.¸¸·- It's done! -·.¸¸·´¯

 (¯`·¯`·.¸¸·´¯)
( \        / )
 ( ) Yes! ( )
  (/      \)
   (.·´¯`·)


text:
Show us your game! - Gamedev's Winter (Summer?) Bash 2021 Showcase!
It's that time of year again!
With 3355 questions asked and 2783 answers provided during the past year, we've been able to help a lot of folks!
Likely, some of our users have been able to publish a game, whether it is on the different mobile, desktop or web platforms.
Here, I'm proposing we help those who contributed to the site to showcase their newly published game.
Here are the rules:

We'd like you to post one answer per game.
Of course, you will add a link to where you publish your game, but the answer can't be a link only one: please tell us about your game, this is a sales pitch for your game ;)
You must have received at least 100 reputation on gamedev between December 1st 2020 and today. (Whether it is from questions, answers, bounties, or even if you've edited 50 questions and got rep for it.)
Your game must have been first published between December 1st 2020 and today. We need to be able to verify this. A published game can be:

a game you have made on your own as an indie
a game you worked on at a game development studio (yes, you can still be proud of your work in this case)
a game you produced during a game jam
a game that was released in "beta" or "early access" during the past year, or that was in beta/early access last year and is now out of beta.

The links you provide must link directly to the distribution platform(s), it must not be a "short link" such as bit.ly, or include some kind of redirection.
No new answers will be allowed once StackExchange Winter Bash 2021 is over.
As always, the content must

be SFW (Safe-For-Work)
respect StackExchange Code of Conduct and Acceptable Use Policy, such as (but not limited to):

No bigotry.
We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. Use stated pronouns (when known). When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.

No harassment.
This includes, but isn’t limited to: bullying, intimidation, vulgar language, direct or indirect threats, sexually suggestive remarks, patterns of inappropriate social contact, and sustained disruptions of discussion.

Sexually Explicit Material. Accounts that use Stack Exchange to post sexually explicit or pornographic material, or links to it, will be suspended.

If you think the content of the game is not safe for everyone, please make sure you add a warning notice to your answer, something like an ESRB content descriptor.

The hat season is gone, and so this event is concluded. Thanks all for your participation!

My name is Steven, I'm a hobbyist artist and I've been programming as proffession for 4 years.
Begin 2021 I've released a Metroidvania project called HertenHeld.
https://ppowersteef.itch.io/hertenheld

(This was published as Beta since July 2019, and released in feb 2021, so it's technically just outside the "published as Beta/early access since past year" criteria. Hopefully that requirement isn't too strict)
It's a short game where you play as a huntress to save her pet deer from a big wolf. Similair as in Metroidvanias, you explore a forest to find upgrades that helps you to progress in new areas.
My drawing experience helped me to make my own assets, it's fun to see your creations coming alive this way.
It's a project that I've been working on since 2017. And it was the first time I tried out a platformer and GameMaker Studio 2. I love the design of Metroidvanias and I've wanted to create one myself, but a lot of them have so much content that it felt overwhelming for a solo developer, until I came accross an indie metroidvania series called Momodora, and that helped me to see Metroidvanias in a smaller indie scale.
The development has been quite the journey with ups and downs. As this was only my second game I've been working on. It was a test on my dedication, and there felt a great relief once the project was finally done. Even though I started to miss working on the project as well, haha.
I've visited this site a lot to search for GameMaker questions and helped similair juniors with problems I've faced as well. I've enjoyed gaining experience in GameMaker Studio 2 this way.

Nice! Thanks for sharing this with us :)

Carrying on my tradition from last year, let me tell you about the game I made in a weekend for TOJam this year!

"that's my jam!" is a freestyling rhythm game. That means you're scored for pressing buttons to the beat, but you get to choose what buttons to press.
You can use the directional arrows / WASD / DPAD / analog stick to step to the left/right/upstage/downstage, and QZEC / UJIK / face buttons / bumpers and triggers to swing your left & right arms out or up.
The game procedurally animates the dancers to follow your moves.

Thanks to David Vitas and James Stajov for providing the game's music tracks, Kenney.nl for the character assets, mukets for the cassette tape model, and Essqué Productions for the Neon 80s font.
Get it free from itch.io here, and let me know what you think!


text:
Should we add a loot tag (or something similar)?
It was proposed in chat that we adopt a tag for "stuff given to the player in a way that involves random numbers".
We currently have 225 posts containing "loot" and another 6 posts containing drop-rate (minus "loot" and "frame-rate" to avoid double counts & posts about performance respectively).
Possibly related reading: meta discussion about mathematics that mentions loot. I didn't see anything else on meta that touched on it.
Does adding a loot tag better facilitate questions about this topic and if so, what should the term be?

I think it's helpful. Presently it's covered inconsistently with an assortment of other tags. Loot based questions are asked often enough to warrant a specifier, but not so often that such a tag would be tiresome. It's possible to have expertise on the topic. The topic isn't ambiguous and doesn't seem like it would be a meta-tag.
I propose the term loot-system. It would cover things like procedural generation of loot as well as the distribution of loot to players. It also happens to also be listed on Wikipedia's glossary of video game terms.

The "loot system" described on Wikipedia is specific to multiplayer games to distribute the loot among a subset of players. I wonder if using the term loot-system to describe the more global generation of drops is appropriate.

I've used the term "loot system" in my own work in single-player contexts, but that's just one data point.


text:
Should we merge the 'import' and 'importing' tags?
We have both import and importing as separate tags (and no guidance for either).
My quick survey of them found two general use cases:

Bringing some sort of game asset from one system to another. For instance importing a model from Blender into Unity. This seems to be the primary use.
Technical programming problems involving import as keyword, build command or given as part of an error message.

Should we merge them and if so, what sort of guidance should be provided?
Are they meta-tags & should we remove them?

Did you notice different patterns in usage of those two? Are they really useful anyway? Can one be an expert in "importing"/what could be the resulting tagd description?

@Vaillancourt Not originally - I found the pair accidentally when I took the wrong tag off a question I was editing. When I typed it back in, the system offered both & I thought that was weird. I've since collected more info & added it to the post. The programming version seems like a meta-tag to me.

Nuke those tags.
And blocklist them.
If it's about the concept of importing other files in python, then the question is likely one about code and should be asked on Stack Overflow.
If it's about importing assets, then the tag should be able to stand on it's own, and I don't see how someone could be an expert in "importing". There are too many ways to interpret what "importing" means so we won't be able to come up with a usage guide that will match what the average user thinks it's about.

As usual, removing a tag from questions implies re-reading each question and making sure it's properly tagged.

Sorry, seeing this late. I agree - I think anything relating to importing assets can fit under [tag:asset-workflow] just fine.

@DMGregory Ah, right; then that would be a tag to consider when editing the questions.

@DMGregory Not sure if this should be a seperate stand alone question: should 'import' (and maybe 'export') be made synonyms with 'asset-workflow'?

I don't think they're synonymous, since some asset-workflow questions are not about importing per se. I think import is superfluous, and depending on the context might be better served by asset-workflow, serialization, or other unrelated tags.


text:
2021: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we say goodbye to 2021, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Game Development over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

Users suspended²
1
19

Users destroyed³
35
0

Users deleted
4
0

Users contacted
11
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
310
882

Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue
25
32

Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
18
122

Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
44
220

Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue
23
466

Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
112
1,160

Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue
24
215

Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
103
269

Tags merged
6
0

Tag synonyms proposed
11
0

Tag synonyms created
9
0

Questions unprotected
1
0

Questions reopened
40
1

Questions protected
3
5

Questions migrated
3
0

Questions flagged⁵
27
292

Questions closed
748
25

Question flags handled⁵
189
128

Posts unlocked
1
2

Posts undeleted
13
77

Posts locked
6
70

Posts deleted⁶
315
2,092

Posts bumped
0
4,348

Escalations to the Community Manager team
11
0

Comments undeleted
49
0

Comments flagged
16
129

Comments deleted⁷
2,259
832

Comment flags handled
118
28

Bounties canceled
1
0

Answers flagged
67
398

Answer flags handled
381
84

All comments on a post moved to chat
26
0

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Game Development without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2020: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing everyone a happy 2022! ^_^


text:
Why was I unable to use the very low quality flag?
Today I encountered a GDSE question that was not in English.
As per this guidance on meta I tried to flag it as Very Low Quality. As a result, I got a popup message stating:
You don't have the permission to use this type of flag.

I went through my flagging history and  I found that I was able to use this flag previously on:

Jan 15, 2018 at 23:08
Aug 6, 2016 at 19:10
May 25, 2016 at 10:50

Also, if it matters, I have enough rep to access the low quality posts review queue.
I found this potentially related post on SO.Meta, however the post I was trying to flag hadn't been deleted. It is possible that I flagged it as or just after it was closed. The system did let me flag it as in need of moderator intervention.
Is this an error? Have the reputation requirements for using VLQ flags changed? Or did is this a matter of my bad timing & the system giving a misleading message?

I just tried to use that flag on the question. I can't; it's not offered to me (usually, whether I am a mod does not make a difference for this kind of site feature). I suspect you tried to flag the question after it was closed. FWIW, I think the site is usually "smart enough" to not present an option that is not available to you. I think the "bug" here is that there is not a more specific error message for this situation.


text:
Should we throttle Community bot bumps on GameDev.StackExchange?
StackExchange sites have a "Community" user bot that occasionally bumps questions under certain circumstances:

The question is open and not deleted
The question was not recently active
The question's score is not negative
The question has no positively-scored answers (more upvotes than downvotes)
The question has at least one non-deleted answer with zero score (no votes, or up & down votes cancel out)
The question is at least 30 days old
It's been at least 120 days since the bot bumped this question

It ranks the top 100 questions that meet these criteria by view count, and randomly selects one to bump to the top of the Active Questions feed, about once per hour.
The intention is to help good questions that maybe didn't get the attention they needed when first posted occasionally see sunlight, so a passing user might give them an answer, or confirm an existing answer is good by upvoting it. It also helps keep the active questions feed from stagnating when new activity is low.
Unfortunately, during periods of very low traffic, this automated bumping completely outpaces non-bot user activity, and we end up with a top page that looks like this:

That's 12 community bumps in a row. In total today 79% of questions on the main feed today are Community bumps.
This has the effect of burying new content and folks looking for answers today - usually behind questions that show a long history of drawing no engagement (so they may be unanswerable, abandoned, etc.).
We can combat this to some degree by clicking on these Community Bump questions and...

Upvoting a zero-score answer, if it's decent (or editing it until it's upvote-worthy)
Downvoting all zero-score answers, if they're all bad
Adding a new answer of higher quality to attract new upvotes
Voting to close the question if it's off-topic or can't be answered well in its current form
Down-voting the question to a negative score
Flagging zero-score "answers" that are not answers, to be deleted or converted to comments by the mods

Any of these actions can prevent the question from being bumped again, and I encourage doing this whenever you can. But since we have such a huge backlog of bumpable questions, this alone won't solve it.
StackExchange has a feature to mitigate this, which skips Community bumps if any of the top n questions on the Active Questions feed were themselves bumped there by the Community bot.
Currently the Expression Engine, Hardware Recommendations, and Japanese StackOverflow sites use n = 5 to stop bumps if any of the top 5 most-recently-active  questions are Community bumps.
Should we request enabling this limit here too? And if so, what threshold n should we use?

Yes, we should enable the limit on Community bumps.
We should use the same threshold that's been shown to work adequately for the Expression Engine, Hardware Recommendations, and Japanese StackOverflow sites: n = 5, so the Community bot should not bump a question to the top of the GameDev.StackExchange Active Questions feed if there's already a Community bump in any of the top 5 slots.

Sounds right to me.

I'm sympagnostic; my landing point is /questions sorted by newest, so it doesn't bury content for me. But given that it does bury content for the default entry point for the site, it makes sense keep that view from getting cluttered with community bumps.

Y'all have clearly done your homework here and I appreciate that.
Doing some math, it looks like you currently have about 1800 questions that are eligible for bumping by the Community user, which is quite a few. I really appreciate that the question here is highlighting solutions to reduce the number of these questions that are eligible and giving you all some guidance in what actions to take.
I've enabled this setting as requested but I sincerely hope that y'all consider reviewing these questions and seeing if you can't reduce their number. Increasing voting (up and down) and closing out-of-scope or unclear questions that may have been overlooked will really help clean up the site and also make the content here more valuable to visitors.

Thank you, Catija! We've definitely been working to clean up that pool, and will continue to do so. Hopefully this change will give new questions a bit more sunlight they can enjoy while that work continues behind the scenes.

If it's at all helpful, we have a public SEDE query you're welcome to use - https://data.stackexchange.com/gamedev/query/1610854/questions-eligible-for-bumping-by-the-community-bot It's odd, it only finds 1100 questions instead of 1800, so I need to figure out how my count was off. :D


text:
Why isn't the markdown created table displaying correctly
When I addded this autoconverted table in Edit- it shows correctly but in the final post it is all messed up- how to create mark down table so it works?

Stage
Startup
Pre-action (~1s)
Action
Attacker Communicates move to pet
OpportunityWindow 1
Attacker Pet attacks  Defender Opportunity 2

Defen-der (AI)
No move
Can move (but often doesn't)
Can move (moves if Attacker doesn't straight away)
Communication will confuse pet with no action
Can set a move
Can't set a move but can set a direction

Attack-er
No move
No move
Can move (assume he communicates a move) Choose commands and hit enter
Now communcate to pet with specific location directions by mouse for directed attack
Pet is preparing- Communication would confuse it
Pet completes move with resolution can miss

The table looks correct on my browser. Can you provide a screenshot of what you're seeing, or describe in more detail what makes it "all messed up"? It may also help to detail what browser and OS you're using, in case the issue is specific to your software environment.

When I first did it, it didn't show any text in the proper post. The Mod edited the post and somehow it came out right.

I noticed you had some extra   at the end of your post you didn't need, so I removed those, but it still displayed correctly for me even with those in place.

This issue is documented in this bug report on meta.se, I'll reproduce the entire answer below for reference. You will notice in the answer below that the last markdown table renders as text above table |test|test| |----|----| |test|test| when viewing this post, but if you pull up the post preview by clicking "Edit", the preview renderer will replace the unparsed text with a preview of the mardown table.

If you have text right above or below the table, the preview renders the table markdown as a table. But after you save the post, the table is not rendered and just shows the markdown code.
You can use the code below as an example. If you try to edit my answer, it shows a table in the preview but not in the backend-rendered post view.
Raw Markdown:

text above table
|test|test|
|----|----|
|test|test|

How it looks in Preview

Result after posting
text above table
|test|test|
|----|----|
|test|test|
So either the backend renderer is broken or the preview renderer is broken.


text:
Show us your in-development game! - Gamdev's Septemberbash 2022 Showcase!
The vacation season is coming to an end, and while it has been a moment to rest and have a good time with the ones we love, it has also been a good time for some of you to work hard on your next game.
Like we did last year, here we're proposing that you show us what you've been working on recently toward making your next game!
You can share with us

What's the most recent feature you've got in?
What are you the most proud of so far?
What's been the hardest part to do so far, why, and how did you managed to get over it?
What part do you think will be the hardest to complete in the near future?
What's a cool trick or solution you found that others might find useful?

Your game is eligible if:

It is a work in progress, meaning either an unreleased game, or an update/extension/DLC in development for a released game.
It is SFW (Safe-for-Work)
Its content respects the StackExchange Code of Conduct and Acceptable Use Policy, including but not limited to...

No bigotry.
We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. Use stated pronouns (when known). When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.

No harassment.
This includes, but isn’t limited to: bullying, intimidation, vulgar language, direct or indirect threats, sexually suggestive remarks, patterns of inappropriate social contact, and sustained disruptions of discussion.

Sexually Explicit Material. Accounts that use Stack Exchange to post sexually explicit or pornographic material, or links to it, will be suspended.
If you think the content of the game is not safe for everyone, please make sure you add a warning notice to your answer, something like an ESRB content descriptor.

Rules for posting answers:

You must have asked at least one question, or provided at least one answer on the main site between September 1st 2021 and September 1st 2022.
One game per answer
Introduce your game first
You can link to your game's site or Steam/App Store page, but the answer can't be a link only one: please tell us about your work!
The links you provide must link directly to the game site, it must not be a "short link" such as bit.ly, or include some kind of redirection.
Submissions will close after September 30th

I’m voting to close this question because September is over; see you next year!

My name is Steven, and I've worked on a platformer/Metroidvania project called HertenHeld with GameMaker in my pasttime, and recently, I've come back to it to work on a content update again.
https://ppowersteef.itch.io/hertenheld
I've talked about HertenHeld in a previous post here, but in short: You play as a huntress through a forest to save a deer from a big bad wolf.
The update in general can be described as "A new bonus area designed to be difficult, with an extra boss at the end.", along with several polish to the base game as well.

And as the latest feature I've worked on: it was actually the boss herself, greatly inspired from the Alura Unes/Venus Weed from Castlevania:

Her design was initially created around 3 years ago, and since then I was already thinking about the possibility of making a boss out of her, but since the game was still in development for release, it was too big of a scope to be manageable. There were also some attempts post-release, but I had not found the motivation back until a year later. I think with the many different body parts connecting and behaving individually, and seeing how my 3 year old boss concept comes to life, is really something I'm proud to see as well.
The hardest part so far: That has been deciding how I wanted to implement the idea. For a longest time I had to decide if I wanted to make it an update, a New Game+, or  a new game altogether. And each time I had to set every good and bad arguments of deciding one over the other. The current game's code felt rather dated at that point, but it was still the easiest to get extra content done without setting too high of an expectation with a full new game.
But what will be the hardest to complete? From what I can so far see, I probably think the testing/balancing the boss, She had a lot of cool attacks, but currently she also can be cheesed very easily, and balancing that out with a character with an end-game arsenal can be quite difficult to manage. But she is well received so far from what I've heard, and I feel motivated to get through this at the end too.
As for a cool trick I found: In order to make some parts of the boss regrow, I had to make an enemy spawner, just to attach it to these parts.
The neat part of these is, that they won't spawn another enemy in if their enemy has already spawned.

I managed to do this with giving the enemy a special spawnID on creation, and link that spawnID to the enemyspawner, then they search thoughout the enemies from the same entity if their ID is inbetween them, and then prevents it from spawning another.
I'd like to share the code with it as well:
GameMaker/GameMaker Studio 2 in the Step Event:
if (spawnObject != noone)
{
    allowSpawn = false;
    if (instance_exists(spawnObject))
    {
        with (spawnObject)
        {
            if (spawnID == other.spawnID)
            {
                other.allowSpawn = false;
                break;
            }
            else
            {
                other.allowSpawn = true;
            }
        }
    }
    else
    {
        allowSpawn = true;
    }

    if (allowSpawn)
    {
        //spawn enemy
        var enemy = instance_create_depth(x, y, depth, spawnObject);
        enemy.spawnID = spawnID;
    }
}

Thanks for sharing!

Automagia - a programming sandbox game
I'm a hobbyist game developer working on an incremental game I'm calling Automagia. It's intended as an educational/sandbox game that creates challenges that players solve by writing C# code.
For example, the player's avatar can only move on land. If they want to move on water, they need a boat - but they can't drive the boat directly. Instead, they control the boat with a script like this one:
[RequireCapability(typeof(IMovement))]
public class MoveOrderControlScript : ControlScript
{
    public override async Task Run()
    {
        while (this.IsAlive)
        {
            var whereTo = await this.AskQuestion<Position>("Where should I go?");
            await this.MoveTo(whereTo);
        }
    }
}

Then they can climb in the boat and tell it to move them across the river. I hope to distinguish it from other (more puzzle-like) programming games by not having a defined output for the solution - a different player might solve the problem instead by having a boat that moves back and forth between two set points automatically, etc. The game poses a problem, but it's up to the player to decide what a satisfactory solution looks like, and then implement their solution, not the solution.
Development status
I have most of the core features in (if the player doesn't mind an ugly UI and having to turn on development mode and install an unsigned MSIX package to play) and am in the process of creating content (and rewriting the UI) so that I can have a vertical slice to show my friends and family by the winter holidays. (My father and little sister are the archetypes of my two core demographics: an enthusiast programmer and a potential student of programming).
I'm currently working on:

Replacing my entire client! The game engine is written on dotnet6 because I want the game to appeal to enthusiasts who live on the latest-and-greatest (and I don't want to teach students on antiquated technologies either). At the time when I started development, dotnet6 was still in preview and there were no good game engines for it. As a result, my client up until now was written as a WinUI app. Now that MonoGame has updated to dotnet6, I'm rewriting my ui in MonoGame+ImGui.

The feature I'm most proud of is:

Seamless Visual Studio integration for rapid iteration times. The player can press Compile in Visual Studio and the new versions of their control scripts become available in Automagia immediately. Control scripts can even call this.InstallUpdates() to restart themselves on the newest version.

The hardest part so far has been:

Saving and loading player defined state. Because this is an incremental game, players need to be able to save and load the game while their solutions are running (ideally with some kind of offline progress). They need saving and loading working from minute-one, and since beginning programmers are part of my core audience, I can't expect them to deal with serialization themselves.

I think the hardest part still to come is:

Error handling and protecting the engine when it runs in the same process as player code. While I've basically thrown in the towel when it comes to intentional cheating (100% of my players are armed with debuggers and my game is written in managed code - preventing cheating is a lost cause), I do want to make sure that control scripts correctly stop when their entity dies, and that the player can't resurrect them or break the engine by cleverly catching an exception, etc.

A cool trick I've found is:

Custom awaitables are great for game logic. await can be made to run single-threaded and only update during defined points during the game's update loop - or wait for an event and then respond immediately to that event. Beyond creating a clean interface for my players to write control scripts, custom awaitables have also been a boon to me writing game logic. Almost every action that any entity in the game can perform is written as an async method in the engine.

Thanks for sharing!


text:
Is the "How are NP-Hard problems managed in game development contexts?" question a "good subjective", should it be reopened?
This question has recently been closed as Needs more focus.
Although I agree that the question is not about an exact single real-world problem that a user is currently facing during the development of a game, it is an interesting theoretical one that is related to game development.
In my humble opinion, it does very well fit within the criteria of "good subjective" that we have here.
Should we reopen it?
(You can vote to reopen it )

A couple of things to note about the close votes:

two votes were cast before the edit in its current form so maybe the users who cast them would not have cast them with the question in its current form
three mods commented on the question without feeling the urge to unilaterally close it, so it's presumable "border line"

I'm raising this here because I'm starting to be concerned about what this site appears to be becoming: a programming site that is specific to game-development tools, which SO can do (and is doing) very well. This question appears to move us away from the "bad" aspects of the site raised last year (We're slowly becoming a Unity Stack Exchange., It's hard to find high-level questions). This is probably a discussion topic to be posted separately here on meta, but welcoming such questions could help keep the community active and healthy. (Also, just to make it clear, I'm not trying to help a fellow mod get more internet points.)

I didn't much care for the original version of the question. Asking for a shopping list of NP hard problem instances isn't particularly deep, i.e. they don't inspire answers that explain "why" and "how". And they may become problematic in terms of maintenance - as new game mechanics (& to a slower extent genres) are invented over time, additional NP hard problems might become 'game dev problems'. As surfaced in the comments, the maintenance aspect is at best a lesser concern.
In contrast, the edited version does inspire "why" and "how" answers. While the question is on the broader side, it has answer that covers pretty much everything I can think of & manages to do so in about a screen's worth of text. I have voted to reopen.
Regarding the concern about GDSE's focus drift - I think that's a valid point. The question in question along with its answer are the sort of thing that will probably still be relevant in spite of the API turn over that's bound to occur over time.

"Asking for a shopping list of NP hard problem instances is problematic" - I somewhat disagree.  Asking for dynamic lists is problematic, but the list of NP-Hard problems encountered in game development doesn't change.  It gives a great resource to study specific to game development.

I was thinking in the sense that new game mechanics (& to a slower extent genres) are invented over time which in turn may add new NP hard problems to the list. I may have overstated the concern though; could happen doesn't mean it will happen at a problematic rate.

@Evorlor I edited to reflect my take on your comment. Regarding your point of a list being a good resource - would you be willing to expound on that as a full answer? While I'm admittedly list answer averse, I'd very much appreciate hearing viewpoints that broaden my thoughts &/or make GDSE a better, more inclusive resource.

I note this answer has 4 upvotes, but the question has received only 1 re-open vote (which has since timed out). If folks upvoting think this is answer is appropriate, please go cast a re-open vote! (Unless all 4 upvotes were from us mods, wary of vetoing the community's close votes?)


text:
Do we want to update the link to the MathJax help in the help pages? If so, to where?
It's been recently brought to our attention that Stack Exchange staff can change the Learn more: MathJax help. link in the Markdown help section LaTeX.

It currently points to an external site: An Introduction to Latex.
Some Stack Exchange communities have had their link point to a Meta post on Mathematics Stack Exchange: MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference.
We have our own Game Development MathJax Cookbook. Please note that this meta post also links to the aforementioned Meta post on Mathematics.
If these options are not interesting for us, we could still come up with something better.

So, what should we do?

I have posted the approach I prefer, so feel free to add another answer if your opinion differs.

Added to the CMs' backlog — you'll get an update when someone picks it up.

I updated the link to point to the site suggested by Vaillancourt.

@SpencerG Thanks!

I don't think having the link point to an external site is bad per se, but since we already have one nicely done on our side, I think we should update it to our own Game Development MathJax Cookbook.

Agree with this one.


text:
Are questions about how to use WebGL2 on topic?
I am new to the site, but not to the SE network. The reason that I signed up for Game Development is that I have a bunch of questions related to WebGL2, and how it can be used for 2D rendering for games, that I would like to ask over a period of time.
I have asked my first question, and recieved a very nice answer. So  far, so good. Before I continue asking, I would just like to check that this is actually a desired topic here? Or would it be better to ask over att Stack Overflow? I don't want to be spamming something that is borderline off topic.
Here are some examples of future questions I might want to ask:

How do I work around the fact that the fragment shader can not read from the framebuffer I am rednering to?
Should I reuse the same vertex buffer for multiple draw calls (empty and refill each time), or is that bad?
How can I efficiently combine batch rendering of quads with z-ordering?

I figure this would fall under "game-specific programming issues (engine architecture, game-related APIs, networking, tools, etc)"?

For the "read from frame buffer" one, make sure to describe at least one specific visual effect you're trying to achieve by doing that. Then we can show ways to achieve that effect.

Thanks for asking!
Yes, this all seems on-topic here!


text:
Show us your [in-development] game! - Gamedev's Winter/Summer Bash 2022 Showcase!
It's that time of year again!
With 2447 questions asked and 1889 answers provided during the past year, we've been able to help a lot of folks!
Likely, some of our users have been able to publish a game, whether it is on the different mobile, desktop or web platforms, while others have been able make progress toward that goal!
Here, we're proposing to help gamedev community members who contributed to the site by showcasing their their latest release, or the progress they've made over the past year.
Here are the rules:

We'd like you to post one answer per game.
You must be a member of the GameDev.StackExchange community.
If you've published your game:

You can add a link to where you publish your game, but the answer can't be a link only one: please tell us about your game, this is a sales pitch for your game ;)
Your game must have been first published between December 1st 2021 and today. We need to be able to verify this. A published game can be:

a game you have made on your own as an indie
a game you worked on at a game development studio (yes, you can still be proud of your work in this case)
a game you produced during a game jam
a game that was released in "beta" or "early access" during the past year, or that was in beta/early access last year and is now out of beta.

If you want to show your progress instead, you can share with us

What's the most recent feature you've got in?
What are you the most proud of so far?
What's been the hardest part to do so far, why, and how did you managed to get over it?
What part do you think will be the hardest to complete in the near future?
What's a cool trick or solution you found that others might find useful?

The links you provide must link directly to the distribution platform(s), it must not be a "short link" such as bit.ly, or include some kind of redirection.
No new answers will be allowed once StackExchange Winter Bash 2022 is over.
As always, the content must

be SFW (Safe-For-Work); if you think the content of the game is not safe for everyone, please make sure you add a warning notice to your answer, something like an ESRB content descriptor.
respect StackExchange Code of Conduct and Acceptable Use Policy, such as (but not limited to):

No bigotry.
We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. Use stated pronouns (when known). When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.

No harassment.
This includes, but isn’t limited to: bullying, intimidation, vulgar language, direct or indirect threats, sexually suggestive remarks, patterns of inappropriate social contact, and sustained disruptions of discussion.

Sexually Explicit Material. Accounts that use Stack Exchange to post sexually explicit or pornographic material, or links to it, will be suspended.

You may have noticed that we've merged both Show us your in-development game! and Show us your game! events. We think will allow more users to post about their game, and make this event much more interesting!

The event is now closed, see you next year!

I'm sad I've missed it. I would have shown my gamedev progress )