So Mike has the thread on Indie Projects and I don't know if any of what I'm saying overlaps with that. If it does, my bad.

Inspired by Rottz's thread, I got to thinking what I feel is missing from GDN. To me it kind of feels that we don't promote.... game development. I know that sounds crazy. And a lot of this stuff is a culmination of different phases, steps, and resources. We have the forums, we have the articles. But it feels to me the actual promotion of development is missing.

[Warning: Bias] I've said before that I wish people could be rewarded for making games. My articles has several games that a beginner should create. Taking that as a start, it would be nice if every time an user makes one of the games in the list that user would get 100 points, plus a tag that shows the game was made and finished. There is 10 games on my list. So if someone finished all 10 games that user would get 1000 points, plus 500 bonus points, and a tag that said "Certified Game Developer" or [insert better title here]. Also, when users participate in contests, they get points for that as well and a tag showing they fully participated in the contest by submitting a finished game. It would be almost like SO in that if I looked at Servant of the Lord's profile, I would see the following tags: Marketplace Seller, Crossbones+, Pong, Worm, Breakout, Missile Command, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Tetris, Pac Man, Ikari Warriors, Super Mario, Certified Game Developer, and Ninja and Pirates Contest. [/Warning: Bias]

I also wonder if anyone would find interest in GDN hosting a webpage (or some other means within the forum software if possible). I say this for HTML5 games. Development in that area is the easiest to see and get feedback on. So you could have a page that was your own personal showcase where you would post up HTML5 games, source code, or the full game executable. I also assume that if GDN provides such a service the user would pay for it monthly or yearly.

I completely understand that some of this would take volunteers and an extra staff or two to make any of what I said happen. And I'm sure the staff have other things that take a higher priority. But I believe that having a vibrant community consists of displaying the works of others, even if it's as simple as an official GDN tag saying, "I made this game. I 1337."

Thanks for reading.

Edit: That's why I shouldn't post late at night. The post and the title didn't quite match up.

Hmm... no takers?

I like the badges and points idea.

But how to expand that beyond internal GameDev.net games?

Maybe have a forum for registering/announcing their own newly released games, so you could link those threads on your profile,

also (without the badge + points, but simply a list of "Released Games").

Regarding the HTML5, I like the idea, but I dont think it would be so simple, it might need backend changes. Why not make it on this same announcement forum?

I agree, gamedev.net is really lacklustre on the actual game development side of things, I mean just look at tigsource (dev logs), it has so many projects going on at once that continuously get updated and some kickstarted! Very rarely on gdnet do I see actual game dev and I know the staff and regulars here want to make this site into a more game centric area, rather than just technical discussion about component based entity system for the nth time.

I would say have a look at tigsource and take some stuff away from it, like ease of creating a new project (It's just a thread), ability to change percentage complete and everyone always just posts with 'awesome!' or 'good progress.' to help motivate the dev. That preview you posted Michael looks promising, but it all depends on how people would see that and by see I mean would it be 'last updated equals being first on a list' or purely popular? Or something else?

I also hope instead of just a buy game button you will also have a beta test button or just download, to be used by the developer if they so wish. How would you handle multiple OSs?