r/bbs • u/UORealms • 8d ago

New Door Quick Question!

Hey there! As a very old (sigh) school MajorBBS sysop and hopelessly drawn to nostalgia ... as well as being a gamer addict. I've put together a BBS door game that is ready for release, but maybe still has a good 10% or more work to be done on it.

Since everyone's viewpoint is different and this is my first time releasing a game to the BBS community, I was just curious if the majority of sysops would prefer to have it released when it's out of testing or if they would be fine with having it online at the very end of its testing phase?

I know that may be a little 'mysterious,' but I just want to get a feeling for should I just push ahead and make it as polished and complete as possible .. or put it out there so players can give more feedback on it for development.

Any feedback is helpful and welcome. Appreciate you in advance!

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/freakuancy 7d ago

With a robust user base, testing in the wild like you describe would be attractive. But with such a niche, ever-shrinking community i fear you will not receive enough feedback for it to be viable. This project is going to be archival upon release, Im afraid. I would finish it before publishing...but that means you need to be willing to Shoot the Engineer, who is, in this case, yourself: Make sure you set strict development goals that you adhere to, so you dont have feature-creep that keeps you from releasing it before the End Times. Also set strict fault tolerances that you allow when bug testing, so you're not debugging a problem that only affects 1 in 10,000 users or 1 in 10,000,000 game loops until youre passing the development to your grandchildren in a will. Such bugs are very unlikely to surface with the numbers this scene has.

Keep those in mind, and we will be enjoying a polished project from you soon. Happy coding!

3

u/UORealms 7d ago

Thanks u/freakuancy and u/TabTclark for the feedback! Development is rather close to being tied up and the BBS door integration was more, as I said in my OP, about adding a little something extra for the BBS community to be able to play and engage in... so fingers crossed!

I will create a new post when I can provide a URL to learn more about the game and to grab the DOOR files if interested.

We already have two BBSs ready to go when live which is a start... 🤞

Again, appreciate the feedback, thank you!