I hope you all can forgive me, I get overwhelmed by forums and the flow of processes that I’m not aware of yet. I appreciate ya’ll very much.
When creating a game, I noticed that a lot of people post WIP threads- how long do you continually put your WIP in the forums until you stop? I assume putting the entire game free of charge and available on the forum, even for testing, must have limits to it if you’re planning to try to publish through the hosted label? I’d be afraid of pushing the game to Hosted Games if I knew everyone could just play it in the WIP forum post or save the link, essentially, based on how hosting through DashingDon works. Is it like an honor system? Do you post a short demo, and then collect a few people to help you beta? How does getting betas work for the flow of things? Do people do betas? Is that normal? What’s the typical process for folks who have completed stuff- like do you update special twitters, or only post here in a single WIP thread and update the main entry as the game progresses?
How do people get cover art? Or those very fancy chapter headings that some stories have that appear to be images and not actually text? I know how to add images, but I always feel like everyone must be commissioning a special person/group of people, lol.
When’s an acceptable time to post a demo or get feedback? Is feedback/WIP posts purely for playtesting, or are there other reasons people do it?
I’m sorry if these are weird questions, I get nervous about starting out in forums and messing up the flow of things. I tried looking at some of the posts, but it always has that feel like everyone knows exactly what they’re doing and you’re kind of like, trying to piece it together.
Also I really sat for like thirty minutes trying to figure out if General was the best place for this question and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve way over-thought this