Quality of games - WIP vs showcase

I've been checking out the showcase section for the past few weeks, seeking inspiration and perhaps lessons for my own project. However the only games I have seen are; flappy birds clones, 3d games that are horrific unfinished mashups of free assets, or decent looking 2D games that have clearly had hard work put into them but still don't seem to have been marketed outside of their unity post. Conversely I look on the WIP section and their prototypes seem more polished than the finished products on the showcase. Its a little disheartening not to see more quality finished games, why is there such a divergence in quality?

 

Probably because the Unity engine is so easy to use, it attracts a lot of newbies who have never made a game before.
Those newbies become so proud on their freshly new experience, they decide to show what they have done, no matter how S***ty they look/sound/feel.
Professional developers know that for whatever reason to not even release a word on their game in development until it's true quality work.

Trust me, I did that a lot back when I started out and got S*** against me in return.
Now I don't go any further than "something is coming, but I won't tell you what it is yet".
One exception was when we had Flavoured Cats in development, but that was because one of our formal team mates forced us to agree to publish the first screenshots already.
A mistake we will never forget.

 

Its a matter of project time, as well. 1 week flappy projects won't end up in WIP - they go straight to showcase. Longer games like Son of Nor have been in development for a much longer time, and only produce one WIP thread. They will eventually produce a showcase thread, but will likely be eventually buried underneath a hundred more 1 week wonders once a little time has passed.

 

Is not obvious? quality takes time.

 

The WIP games never seem to end up on the showcase forum though... unless they are all on the same schedule. Quite a few of the games on showcase are actually unplayable as in broken, who would pay the fee to publish such games.

 

I don't know what answer you are looking for... a good project takes time, that's assumming ofc that is a serious project and not just a pretty prototype.

And finishing and publishing crappy projects is part of the learning process, somebody said here that to make good games you need experience and to get experience you need to make a lot of bad games.

 

Feel free to make a lot of bad games, but don't publish them.
Publishing bad games will harm your reputation during your learning process.

After all, only you know you're still learning.
Any other person at the other hand has no clue and will criticise you until you decide to give up on making any new games.

 

The longest I've managed was about 6 months, now its on-off the odd couple hours every month or so.

I do admire those Son of Nor guys for keeping at it - even though I don't especially like the project and I don't think they'll make any money out of it I admire that determination for chipping away at it.

 

Would be nice to rate threads so we can sort out the best for inspiration.

 

In the past going to the Showcase you could see great quality WIPs and Completed games/projects. It was great. If a project was crap, the person wouldnt put it up because they would be embarrassed to put it up. Now, its like no one is embarrassed of their S*** project, and they get coddled and babied by people telling them its not crap, when its actually total S***. We need to be more honest and start telling people with S*** projects that their projects are S*** and to take it off.

I like that idea.

It should be a rating if it should stay posted in the Showcase or WIP section. If it rates a 1 or 0 it should be deleted.

If a WIP and its deleted due to bad rating, the poster should be forbidden from posting the exact same WIP project for a duration of one month to allow them to work on it to get it better and more worthy of being in the WIP section.

That should remove about 95% of the junk thats on there.

 

I still think this is nonsense, if a project is S*** and the people behind it publish it they will get the feedback from gamers (or be ignored) telling them the harsh truth.

There's no need to have a "forum seal of approval", especially when this forum is full with people without nothing to show and a lot of time to post.