Bringing Back Gamepress
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The GamePress community was full of people uploading crappy games with default graphics, the hyperPad community has lots more people who know what they are doing compared to GamePress, and very much more often than GamePress the uploads to the hub are good. What's even better about hyperPad is the fact that you can comment on games, post stuff in forums, and hyperPad itself is generally better and more efficient than GamePress was. I do wish though that the community was bigger. Also as @iTap-Development said, hyperPad isn't here to give you sprites, if you want sprites you can either research for them or ask on the forums where you could find them. Default sprite games looked stupid.
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GamePrrss won't be coming back. As far as behind the scenes technology goes, HyperPad is wayyyyy more advanced and better. It's just not possible.
Now let's address why you think GamePress is better, and how we can move forward to make HyperPad better.
The editor and functionality in HyperPad are better. It's more efficient, less buggy, crashes less, has more features. List goes on.
The sprites and other assets, well sure.. GameaPress had more junk included with it. But in the end that's what it was. Junk.
The assets had no theme. They were pretty random and nothing fit together. Sure there was more, but they were useless as a whole. After a lot of feedback and seeing how the community was using them we didn't add them back in HyperPad.
Now, HyperPad is also very very early in its life. We're taking our time and doing things right (unlike GamePress). One thing we want to do right is assets.
Notice how you have to download assets from what almost looks and feels like a shop/hub?
There is a plan in store there... I'll give you a hint.
More assets! We'all be continuing to add free assets to get you started. But we plan on opening this up so other awesom users can also put up assets for you to download.
We're just ironing out the details and testing the platform with our own "sucky" assets. Be patient.As for community, I whole heartedly disagree..
Let's first address functionality of the community.
The GamePress arcade let you share play, and rate games. Oh GamePress also had a terrible broken search.HyperPad let's you:
- share games
- play games
- rate games
- leave comments
- More integrated forum
- user profiles
- following users
- notifications
- news feed based on who you're following
- have custom avatars
- have custom banners for your project or profile
- screenshots for projects
-access hub through web browser - peoject reporting and moderation
And there is more coming.
It's true HyperPad is lacking a search... but we want to do it right. The search in GamePress was broken, and hardly worked. Plus it really sucked visually.
The search in HyperPad will use keywords (notice how they're required when sharing to the hub?) it'll take comments, users etc all into account. Plus the search result page will be generated dynamically. This means we can do cool stuff like use a specific keyword for contests or promotions and have a page generated automatically.Now community content and size.. yes. It's true. HyperPad has a smaller community. But that's on purpose. With GamePress we grew too quickly and had nothing in place to scale. This meant we couldn't handle user feedback, we couldn't update the app or make major changes to the infrastructure, we couldn't moderate, we couldn't help our users... basically it was a big mess.
Then there is the quality of content... we've purposely made it more difficult to upload to the hub. This way only serious (or at least committed) users will share content. GamePress will filled with trash. Hundreds, maybe thousands of low quality five night at Freddy clones, copies of the interactive tutorial, blank projects, projects with nothing but some little kids face on it.... just trash. And since there was no way to moderate it, the good stuff was hard to find.
Yes, there was more games. But they sucked.
We're also still trying to figure things out here. Ideally we'd like to eventually make it easier to share and get more content.. but not for the sake of quality.
One thing we're trying to figure out is how to open up the hub more for schools and classes, but not have their class projects affect the rest of the hub or users.
Basically seperate the lower quality content with out creating restrictions.This also applies to community size. GamePress has a lot more users. I think we were at half a million downloads, and about 30,000 monthly active users at its peak.
With HyperPad we are no where near that. And that's ok! It's bad for business, but great for community building and for the overall future. We're taking a hit with money so we can build a better community. Community building takes time.
So while GamePress had hundreds of thousands of users, they were not helpful. They didn't help each other (partially because they couldn't), they didn't want to learn and advance their skills, and they just were not that mature ( most were very young 9-13 yer olds).
With HyperPad we're taking a different approach.
We're trying to focus on getting some great hard core users who are committed to the app, and community. This way when we do get that influx of users (and most likely younger users) there will be some infrastructure and community in place for them to look up to. They will see our current awesome users as an example and (hopefully) aim to become like them. If you look at the hub and forum, you will see the content is amazing, the users are helpful (both helping other users, and giving us valuable feedback to make HyperPad better).
Things are just better.
We're pretty happy with how awesome our community is, and almost ready to be a bit more vocal to attract new users.Any ways, we're working on making it better, planning on growing and adding more stuff. If you want to help and give specific ideas on how to move forward we're more than happy to listen :)
Also sorry for the typos. I typed this out on my phone at 1 am 😩
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@Murtaza I think this person was just venting.
There was a point when I thought Gamepress should have been kept but Hyperpad has become much better. The only thing I miss from Gamepress is the way physics worked (objects didn't go through each other) and one other thing I can't remember right now.
I like how we are forced to make our own graphics but I am also looking forward to when users can upload graphics packs.
I'd like to see Hyperpad get it's user numbers back up, but perhaps there are some things to learn from why Gamepress was able to hit those numbers. My first perception was that game press was a free and easy node-based programming platform for IOS.
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@TutorialDoctor said in Bringing Back Gamepress:
@Murtaza I think this person was just venting.
There was a point when I thought Gamepress should have been kept but Hyperpad has become much better. The only thing I miss from Gamepress is the way physics worked (objects didn't go through each other) and one other thing I can't remember right now.
I like how we are forced to make our own graphics but I am also looking forward to when users can upload graphics packs.
I'd like to see Hyperpad get it's user numbers back up, but perhaps there are some things to learn from why Gamepress was able to hit those numbers. My first perception was that game press was a free and easy node-based programming platform for IOS.
I realize they're just venting. But I still felt the need to explain some of our decisions :).
As for physics, everything comes at a cost. The is physics engine had other limitations making updates harder, and had worse performance. As a compromise we've added some options under global properties to allow you to increase the number of physics calculations resulting in more accurate physics and less bouncy. But this comes at a performance cost.
I also hope to get our numbers up. But I don't want to do it prematurely. There is still a lot for us to do before we can handle a large influx of users.
The reason why GamePress got big was a few reasons. We dropped the price to free, but also got picked up by some news sites, working actively on trying to get the word out there and getting press, paid for some advertising. We were just more vocal about getting users. Also we didn't care what type of users and who used the platform.
Ultimately that was a mistake.We're taking things slow on purpose so we don't repeat those same mistakes.
HyperPad ( and GamePress) is used mostly by education, but also by aspiring developers. Education users like it because it's powerful enough to be used by the aspiring developers and it can be a real tool.
This is where one of our problems lie. If we focus heavily on education, we lose and alienate the "hardcore" community.. this also ends up costing us the education users because now they don't see a future in it.
We need to tackle both with our alientating either one. Figuring out how to grow both is key to our communities success. -
@Murtaza you mention the number of physics calculations, what is the difference between the physics refresh rate, and the physics iterations?
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@iTap-Development
We cover that in the manual
https://hyperpad.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207698086-Global-PropertiesPhysics Refresh Rate: This is the number of times the physics calculations get updated per second. Increasing this makes your physics more accurate and feel less like "jelly", but it will negatively impact your performance.
Physics Iterations: This is the number of physics calculations done each frame. Increasing this will make physics more accurate, but this comes at the cost of performance.You'll most likely need to play with both of these numbers.
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@Murtaza so changing just one isn't enough? Or can one do it?
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@iTap-Development
The two numbers often rely on each other. Takes some trial and error to get it to feel good for your specific situation. Unfortunately there is not much help we can provide with it since it depends on each game and the feeling you're trying to achieve. -
The community is a minuscule fraction of the old Gamepress community but this community is pretty much the best of what Gamepress had. The Gamepress community was super cancerous. 90% of the games posted on the Arcade were just ripoffs or spam. Hyperpad is so much better. I do wish we had a larger community though because making multiplayer games will be difficult if their is nobody to test them.
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Wow, I regret posting this, I look like an idiot. Looking back to Gamepress, it's community was kinda crappy. 2 suggestions though, i need an square eraser tool for when your importing pixel art from your camera roll, and a pencil tool to make placing blocks in vertical rows easy. And can someone tell me how to upload projects via hub
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Next to your project, there's a clod with an up arrow, press that to upload. To make vertical rows of blocks, just either spam the duplicate button or make it one large object.
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@HudsonGami Get the app "Back Eraser" or use something like Pixelmator and make sure you export all your images with transparent backgrounds as PNGs.
