Post about Monkey day
Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/Post about Monkey day
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| There are 899 users. We need more. It's mutually beneficial for all of us for there to be more activity in the community and for Mark to make more money. Post about Monkey and link to the site on twitter/facebook/forums today! |
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| I was just thinking about it this morning. I agree. I am actually going to put it on the splash screen for my game. si said he wished that he had mentioned it at the BAFTA's. That would have been a great plug! |
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| It think the site just needs a redesign and a more professional look, not easy to get people to seriously look at monkey, the name probably doesn't help either, not sure what happened to that redesign that was knocking about a few months but looks like that ain't happening. |
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| I think that somebody is working on a new design. |
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| @Supertinoi I agree 100%, the site is so dated people take one look and instantly get turned off and go look for something else, meaning no disrespect to the people who work on it, but they really need to pull their collective fingers out and bring it upto modern standards, or hire some one else to do it for them. As for linking monkey I do it all the time, its something I also agree with, I often wonder why mark does not make a monkey(BRANDED) loading screen for it, people can load all their assets in have a nice looking monkey loading screen, woulndt need to be anything garish just look at unities loading bar, or any other development tool for that matter they all tend to proudly stamp their loading bars with their own mark, no pun intended. |
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| maybe someone could make a little badge "made with monkey" that can be blessed by BRL and used in the game splash screens/credits? |
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| I really think a default branded loading bar/screen is the way to go, give pro users the ability to skin or exit thief loading bar but lock it out in the lite version. Anyone making HTML5 games with the demo will get the monkey branded loading bar any pro user would then get the same but with the added option to change it. That being said if some one comes up with a monkey loading bar and screen I wod be more than happy to use it. And god typing with an iphoe can be so annoying |
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| Rofl auto spell fails . Will edit my above post when I'm on ma pc next. |
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| This site design is the weakest Monkey point. I'm sure Monkey is losing attention because this site does not reflect a well finished product. (sorry, I mean to be constructive). If you ask me,changing this site design is the most urgent think Monkey needs. |
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| Agree. The community functionality of the site is fine, just the design needs modernising. What happened to dev's design? Seemed like that was a good one... How did unity become so popular, it obviously didnt start off life well known. What did they do? Maybe Mark could sponsor a game creation competition with a cash / hardware prize. Entrants can use the html5 version of monkey to create the game. I'm clearly no marketing expert from my own failed experiences, so I wonder what it would take to elevate monkey further? |
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| Well, incidentally I just did my part. I wrote an article on gamedev.net (as part of their 'may contest', and in the end, I mentioned I used Monkey to develop the game, linking back here :) Now I'm just hoping I get enough "reviews" to the article to go live at the site :) Don't know if you guys can see it, but the article appears to be here |
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| Skn3 , Functionality sucks here mate, compare it to almost any other like for like forum and its missing millions of stuff, Avatars, Post Counts, Private Messages, Follow un-Follow , Like for posts, or upvote for posts where people offer the best help to a persons question or request for support, and thats just the forums. The front end needs a complete overhaul, the apps section needs to be way more arcade like, something people from outside the community can come to and mess with the games and apps that are on it. everything about this site screams bland, plane boring unfinished, had I not been a very long term fan of marks work i would never have bought monkey. the really sad thing is that most of this will simply be ignored , i think mark is happy with the statuesque and has no interest in marketing the game more, creating competitions which I think its a mint idea or making the site any better than it is now. Take a look at this.. You may not agree with me, but this is how I and everyone I show see's monkey. EDIT - url fail. image incoming. EDIT EDIT - damn I flattened it before spellchecking it sorry if it bothers you lol.  |
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| The bigest issue with this design, is basicly front page. It's intended to already made customers and uninviting to newcomers: Nothing to show GRAPHICALY something cool done with Monkey that gets your attention. No relevant news for newcomers. (latest version should not be in the front page, this is for already done customers). And other than that, what relevant information that makes me thing Monkey is really a must is shown there? Definitively a feeling of an amateurish site in the graphical design area (please, no ofense intended). While this dated design could attract some indies, it puts Monkey in a very bad competing situation on the first impression land and, in this kind of development tools, first impression is everything. Newcomers won't bother reading why Monkey is su much better than any of the other multi-device 2d game development tools, if they don't get the best first impression possible. We need to make them want to read more. The language, the libraries it has, everything is very very good. but the site hides it absurdly. Would you buy a good Rollex on a chinese-like cheap replica shop? In my opinion, we have a rollex, but the shop needs a total remake. No ofense intended, just trying to be constructive. |
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| haxe's forums are much worse, so i wouldn't waste time fixing the forums here, just get the front page better organized and market monkey's features better. |
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| Very nice article, Slotman! |
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| It would be nice to have avatars and especially private messaging, that would be useful for building the community. Im not sure it's themost important aspect. The main important thing as everyone seems to agree on, is to improve the professionality (made up word) of the frontpage. http://monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=4052 This would do the job perfectly! |
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| Haxe has improved their marketing significantly: http://haxe.org/ http://www.nme.io/ |
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| How did unity become so popular, it obviously didnt start off life well known. What did they do? VC funding helps a lot... Regarding the site design, yes a new site design is in the works. |
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| well thats very good to know, I really hope you put some time into the forums, go with a tried and tested setup like invission, ip, phpbb 3, these forums get so much support and testing their damn good at what they do. Bolstering the front page is a must, but you cant ignore the forums , once people get their feet in the door you want to make them feel as much at home as possible, and good forum functionality will do that, we already have a good user environment in terms of people being friendly and not morons, now we just need the visuals and functionality to match it. |
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| Taiphoz, while having something like IP, phpBB, SMF, or vBulletin would be great, they are riddled with security bugs. I've found more than a handful in the past, just looking through the validation code of these forum systems. As well as having had a kiddie scripter use a ready-made SQL injection to steal account information from a live forum using one of these. I cannot recommended enough against using them; cause if a nasty security bug is found and some kiddie scripter gets their hands on it, they can do some serious damage to the forums. As long as you avoid those systems, though, only someone who really knows what they're doing can find their way in. And people like that, typically aren't there to steal information, they're there for the thrill. On another similar note, I've programmed around 5 different forums (...cause I'm never satisfied...) in php/AJAX/SQL(MySQL). If any help with SQL or php is needed, I've been doing it for ages and am open to doing it any time. Especially if it involves adding a pagination system to this forum, which it really needs. |
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| I could not disagree with you more. While I will agree that all of these forum software providers have been hit in the past with vulnerabilities, they are all well aged, and well supported, not to mention used by millions. As a result any new exploits that come out are often patched rapidly, that's the major plus which comes from having an active team behind the softwere you use. And if you think using their own software is secure its not, in fact its crap I recall blitz being hacked a number of times, and that they stored all our passwords in plain text form, nothing was encrypted, so please dont make the mistake of assuming that their own software is more secure through obscurity, because its not. I would think that right now you would be very hard pushed to find any flaws in a default install of phpbb 3, or any of the others for that matter, in fact I would be very surprised if you could, not that I think its impossible but simply the fact that they have such good support, and MASSIVE communities behind them that weed out problem code. |
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| And if you think using their own software is secure its not, in fact its crap I recall blitz being hacked a number of times, and that they stored all our passwords in plain text form, nothing was encrypted, so please dont make the mistake of assuming that their own software is more secure through obscurity, because its not. I wasn't saying it was secure, I was stating that it keeps the script kiddies out. They don't know what they're doing and as a result, something, like this bored, becomes un-hackable to them. I would think that right now you would be very hard pushed to find any flaws in a default install of phpbb 3, or any of the others for that matter, in fact I would be very surprised if you could, not that I think its impossible but simply the fact that they have such good support, and MASSIVE communities behind them that weed out problem code. I was a developer for phpBB 3 back when I was 16. I remember I stopped developing because the forum I had running it was hit by a script kiddie. Seeing that just really made me disappointed in the lack of checks these systems go through and has made me extremely resistant to want to use them ever again. This however, was not what made my decision final. I ran a vBulletin on my site that was updated frequently and it was hit 2 years ago by a script kiddie. After that I've just had it with the crappy security programming going into these. What can I say, if the security was prioritized more like how WordPress handles it, I would be far less resistant. |
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| I hope Simon has the wisdom to not read your comments and take them as rule. No offence intended of course, just because you had such a bad time does not mean others did, or do. PHP BB3, Invision, IP, and many others are fine pieces of software developed by devoted teams with thriving and devoted communities, all of which means their in a far more secure situation now than they were when you last looked at them, just like wordpress, the longer they are worked on the better they get. Personally I think a wordpress front end would be a stunning addition to the site, I personally LOVE wordpress :), but even that's had its exploits over the years, and like phpbb and the others with active developers it gets patched, it gets fixed and people move on. Personally I think the biggest issue for any web software is a lazy or inexperienced admins who install forums and then never give them a second thought, who never visit the author site to check for updates and who don't vet any additional plugins they install. |
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| I should also add the amazing vbulletin to that list of stunning forums, only left it out cos its normally a second thought for me, as people I make sites for tend to want free, rather than paid. but vb runs on sites like EA, Steam and countless other huge websites, and as a choice for mark, should be something he looks at. |
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| The front page needs to be an actual sales page - right now it does not appeal to serious coders who would rather write everything from scratch, it doesn't appeal to the average indie, and it doesn't appeal to the non-coder who will probably just drop a few k on Unity because their sales pages work - all of their desires, needs, and concerns needs to be addressed and they need to be shown and told the opportunity Monkey allows for making games and apps. It doesn't need to be dynamic at all. It just needs to focus on selling and marketing Monkey well. That means using copy, split testing changes to optimize sales, and only showing the very best most attractive examples of products made with Monkey. If forum software was changing I would recommend the modern and excellent: http://www.discourse.org/ Seriously it's awesome and is perfect for a coding community. In my opinion, access to the community should not be restricted to paying users but to everyone. Growing the community is more important than restricting access (where now could someone wanting to use Monkey ask questions? how do they get support with the html5 demo to learn why Monkey rocks?), and if need be paying users can have badges with non-badged users unable to post in non-html5 topics. |
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| Personally I think a wordpress front end would be a stunning addition to the site, I personally LOVE wordpress :), but even that's had its exploits over the years, and like phpbb and the others with active developers it gets patched, it gets fixed and people move on. Except the people that were exploited because of the security bugs. It can have a serious impact. Such as private information being stolen and used to, well, steal more from that person. Personally I think the biggest issue for any web software is a lazy or inexperienced admins who install forums and then never give them a second thought, who never visit the author site to check for updates and who don't vet any additional plugins they install. I agree and disagree. I definitely agree that lazy/inexperienced admins do have the most problems. However, I was experienced, updated frequently, and still had problems. I also saw an even more experienced admin than me, and I mean far more experienced, get hacked as well, back in 2008, through a vB exploit. My thoughts are, while I agree that the software has aged and there's a good chance that phpBB and a few of the others like SMF are decently secure, vBulletin's still lacking greatly in security. At this point I think I just have a vendetta against vB which rolls into the others. -------- If forum software was changing I would recommend the modern and excellent: http://www.discourse.org/ I saw that a while back on Coding Horror and it looked neat. Tried it and it's odd, but not bad. It definitely is different. Only beef I have with it is that it's written using Ruby and because of RPG Maker, which I used to use, I've gathered a rather large amount of hatred towards Ruby. The front page needs to be an actual sales page - right now it does not appeal to serious coders who would rather write everything from scratch, it doesn't appeal to the average indie, and it doesn't appeal to the non-coder who will probably just drop a few k on Unity because their sales pages work I'm a 'serious coder' who had never really touched a Blitz product seriously before Monkey. What it came down to for me was the style and how comfortable I was with it. When I used Unity, there were parts that were fine and other parts that felt very uncomfortable which made me drop it as a plausible choice for developing with. Recently, some software that's gotten my attention and I had a comfortable time trying was CraftStudio. Now it has a nice site, but that definitely is not what made me want to consider buying it. What I mean by all of this is, yes the site is important, but it's not everything. The product itself needs to be presentable as well. Sadly, Ted falls short as an IDE and thus makes Monkey look bad. I saw Jungle IDE before I bought Monkey and because of that I realized that Monkey would be suitable software to develop in. If I had not seen Jungle IDE, I would not have bought Monkey. In my opinion, access to the community should not be restricted to paying users but to everyone. Yeah, it would be great. I think, though, the idea is to keep the riff-raff out since there's not enough people to moderate them. -------- I feel like I've caused the conversation to derail... |
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| If more people see the main message and post about Monkey then good. Ruby is a beautiful language. Give it another chance! Erlang and Elixer work well with it. They all three complement each other very well for server applications because they have have extremely awesome strengths. >What I mean by all of this is, yes the site is important, but it's not everything. It's the marketing which matters. It's why every other game dev tool has a much larger audience while rationally Monkey is superior for a lot of needs. To sell the best thing you can do is show opportunity. Other tools have better marketing which does this very well. Pretty pictures of games works really well because everyone is shallow. Other things such as social proof really work well - talking about the success is NSS is good, but it needs to be far more prominent. The front page has a ton of links and no clear call to action which stands out. It should be one link - buy - at the top. Mark needs a newsletter too. It is one of the most important marketing tools anyone can have. Understanding marketing requires understanding the real reason most people buy things. You don't have to guess, and you don't need any wizardly marketing insights (although they help to avoid mistakes) all you really need is the time and willingness to test to see what changes can be done to the sale page to increase conversion - there are lots of tools which can help make this easy so that more people buy. The more people who buy, the more who get invested in and can get into using it, which means more community activity and resources. The more people buy the more money Mark gets to support development. >there's not enough people to moderate them. The only problem we have had with people here is talking in ways which encourages the community to remain insular. Look at the competition. They have open communities, and it works to their advantage. Keep the forum tidy and effortless or small, or allow the community to grow and use reporting features to keep trolls away. |
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| thats another amazing oversight and top point Soap, this community is like a little North Korean locked in a house with his family unable to get out or let anyone else in. It needs to be at least partially open so as you said people who want to learn about monkey can come and ask, those using the lite version and I know a few who are(mostly young kids) who at the moment dont have any where to ask about it, other than sending e-mails to me. I would also change the manner in which brl handle user details, at the moment the forum is all part of the main site, which is partly the problem as it requires a user to have a key to post. I think a wise move, and a move made by so many others is to have a division between their community forums, and their paying customers in terms of how their accounts are managed, paying should gain you a username, password and access to updates from the main site, possibly a few other neat little things like notifications of news or comments, meanwhile for non paying users who want to post on the forums they would simply need to register. This would allow for brl to manage all their paying customers separately and securely while opening up the community to as wide a range of people as possible. It's a system I have used myself in the past and it works a treat, in terms of wordpress it comes with a number of plugins which allow an admin to bridge the blog, and their forum allowing for the passing of information between them, like having more recent comments from the forum appear on the blog, not something I really suggest just explaining that its all possible. |
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| Mark could always consider opening a special forum that requires only registration, and see how that goes. Interested potential users could ask questions, and if it turns out to be too much of a bear pit it can be closed again. Call it 'Monkey Demo Open Forum' or something. Maybe even ask registrants for a code that is in the demo. |
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| Seems like a fairly hot topic! I think a public area would help, you would definitely have people asking about the product more. The other day I had to buy some childrens shoes as we were looking after a friends daughter. I don't have any children, so it was totally new to me. It was an emergency situation at night so she arrived shoeless in her night time clothes. The next day I was able to walk into a shop, ask the lady at the counter what UK shoe size would equal 14cm feet. 5 mins later I left having made a purchase. If she had made me signup to a loyalty/membership program before being allowed into the shop, I would have walked away. It probably does not apply to all customers, but you will definitely have some that "walk away" because they can't inquire about the product first. When you add that to the website not having the right layout for selling the product, Id imagine you are going to lose a fair number of new customers. The other thing that monkey needs to potential focus on if its wanting to attract a larger audience, is the feature set. I posted a while ago about some conversations I had with various indies in Cambridge meetups. A lot of people had heard about monkey but they had tried a very early version that didn't have many features. The lack of game orientated networking was a major turn off for some. It could potentially be good to also think of some target specific "plus pack" expansions? It could be beneficial to start promoting some of the 3rd party features with monkey such as (if authors would permit): - flixel/diddy/ignition - jungle ide - mini b3d - spriter/spine I could see a monkey + jungleide promotional package doing well! Even if the 3rd party things are not core, it would definitely interest people to know that there are a ton of possibilities with monkey modules. |
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| Don't take this as a knock against Monkey, because personally I love it and use it every day, but have we considered that there might be other reasons that something like Unity or GameMaker have broader adoption? From a new user standpoint, both programs offer a much lower barrier of entry; no code required to start, free versions that are less feature limited, and access most of the forum by all users being three I can name right off the top of my head. They also have significantly more tutorials, as well as much more comprehensive documentation. While I agree the site could maybe use a bit of a revamp, there is an issue that goes deeper than just making things more attractive and professional looking. |
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| Yeah, thats why I and others have suggested the things we have a few posts up. |
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| Monkey isn't going to appeal to people that don't want to code regardless, so that isn't an issue. I personally work to sell Monkey in any way I can. Whether it is email, facebook, blog, word of mouth or whatever. I have been in the Blitz community for a long time, having used BB back on the PC not long after it first came out. I seriously understand Mark not being overly involved in the forums because it can be a huge time sink and sometimes you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. But I positively hate almost no presence at all. This thread is the perfect example. You have people on here that are obviously passionate about Monkey and knowledgeable about selling but nary an official comment is ever made. The demo seriously needs to be updated regularly and people need to be able to ask questions. I would prefer better forums, but besides pagination and not being crazy about the search functionality, I can live with it. If Monkey gets a wider user base, we all win. Wider adoption means more people posting their excellent ideas and code. More money for Mark to maybe hire someone to do better docs, or improve the IDE or do some marketing , which in turns brings in more users, etc :) The Blitz community has always been one of it's best selling points. I have been on many forums over the years and the quality of posts and coders that make contributions is one of the best selling points for a Blitz product. The way Brucey did things for Max and the great stuff being given away like diddy, miniB3D, fantomEngine and all of the stuff SKN is doing just to name a few are amazing and give the language so much functionality. People trying an outdated demo with no access to the forums are not going to even know about any of that. It shouldn't be a surprise that when someone buys Monkey they got way more than they bargained for because they couldn't see all of that great stuff beforehand. Sorry for the long rant. I am very passionate about Blitz and it frustrates me that a company that made tools that helped me be able to really bring my game ideas to life for the first time doesn't want more people to be able to do the same! Mark, please listen to your loyal fans! |
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| One thing I always do is put the language logo on the front screen on the game so for monkey there's a monkey logo in the bottom right of the screen :-) |
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| @EdzUp - yeah I am going to do that on my current release, some official "Made with Monkey" graphics would be nice. |
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| I would be game for adding that as well.. this could possibly be a topic of its own tho with some graphical suggestions for such a thing. I would be willing to draw up some suggestions as I'm sure others would as well. Still think a default monkey loading bar is the best approach tho, but in its absence a simply monkey splash screen would be cool, what if we make it a module, something people can just call in their code CallMonkeySplsh() which would animate out a made with monkey splash screen ? |
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| That would be nice - not every one uses a loading bar. But a series of frames or a single 'Made With Monkey' image would be fine too - then it could be incorporated in credit screens or whatever. There could be an App.CallMonkeySplash() method available that uses it automatically. |
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| How about one (or several of us) sponsor Monkey game dev competition? Along with reasonable prizes (something compelling enough to make people want to compete) for top 3 games? Decide on a theme, set some ground rules, entry date, then spread the word. The folks at Scirra do this every once in a while with their game engine to boost their exposure. Works quite well for them. Just a thought. |
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| Thanks Taiphoz - ill use those if thats ok. |
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| yeah that's why I did them, I will probably play with the idea some more, rather than creating a new image I will just edit the one above to save me from updating links and posts. would be nice to see what other artists can come up with, these took me like 60 seconds. |
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| I would prefer "Made With Monkey" |
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| This is a good step. I second the "Made With Monkey". Potentially all on the top edge of the circle so you don't have to read upside down? |
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| I prefer "Made With" on top, and "Monkey" on the bottom. Should be fast to read on the splashscreen. |
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| hows that now ? its a bit rough still. |
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| Heh, just took a look at my article on gamedev, and it has over a thousand hits! :) Hopes it helps on sales a little bit :) |
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| Haha I like the nana one :D also the one to left of banana skin is good. 1000 hits nice! |
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| Nice on the Article, hope it does indeed.. All the layer data is in that image so if anyone wants to play around with the colours or what ever, just grab it and open in photoshop or anything else that can read full layered pngs. |
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| Heh, just took a look at my article on gamedev, The link "Monkey" doesn't go back to Monkey website, it must think it is a local reference? Your Icon Games link doesn't work either. |
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| Ouch! Thanks for pointing it out... links without http:// in front of them apparently were linked as http://gamedeve.net(link) =( |
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a feeble attempt: edit: i forgot the tuft of hair on the top of the monkey. i'll have to add that in. |
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| That's more of a cyber-monkey! It would fit Android, though. I would choose the first colour scheme and the second font. (But my taste in fonts is notoriously bad.) |
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| Those are nice adam, thanks. |
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| reminds me of minecraft :), also second font looks better I think, with the first colours. |
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| Removed |
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Well, its a simple one: (original is Inkscape, just some filters on the logo). |
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| That looks great Bazmonkey... I would like the "made with" left aligned with the "monkey" text. Any chance you could share the original? |
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| Cheers, v kind. I like to dabble, but I am no artist (hence, I dont think I could make a new logo). For me its about knowing Inkscape pretty well, so I can (eventually) get the effect I want. I use Inkscape filters like a crazy person. Zip: made-with-monkey.zip I put some notes in the svg. Main thing is I dont have a hi res monkey logo, and if I use trace bitmap it loses a lot. Edit - yeah, couldnt decide where to align that text ;) Edi2 - have updated the zip to include the logo images - if the images look broken edit the paths to point to the local versions. sry... |
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| @bazmonkey Not sure if this help, but it is a monkey logo in svg. I am sure I got it in this forum, but from where or who I forgot. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/129162597/monkey.svg |
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| Oh yeah, thats handy. Ideally we need the font too (maybe its commercial, I dont recognise it), but I expect the text will trace to path ok - I will try to do some updates/variations (incl some ideas from others; the circular badge idea, and maybe a cyber-monkey ;). |
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| I like that baz. |
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| Does no one think the real problem is the name "Monkey"? Whenever a discussion about alternate development tools pops up over at the Mochi forums, and such discussions are getting common with Flash's uncertain future, I'll mention Monkey and you can hear crickets chirping in response. The name may be fine for us since we already know the quality of the tools Mark produces, but to someone unfamiliar with BRL the name Monkey kills the deal. I don't think it's too late to change the name and relaunch it along with a new site design. |
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| The name has its issues but I don't see it as the "real" problem. I don't think there is such a single point of failure. If you take the name and the overall brand image (logo, website design etc.) then there's an issue of it appearing to be a language for kids. I'm sure that does put many off. In reality though if the underlying tech sales pitch was amazing then people would get past the branding and even embrace it. I'm not saying that a re-brand wouldn't be a positive thing (depending on the new branding, of course) but it's not going to resolve the deeper reasons why people look at Monkey and then decide to go elsewhere. |
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| I don't think it's too late to change the name and relaunch it along with a new site design It's never too late to do that, major companies do it all the time! but it's not going to resolve the deeper reasons why people look at Monkey Do many people even look at Monkey in the first place? How is it advertised and marketed? Most of us know about Monkey as we have been Blitz fans and transferred over... but how do new users find out about Monkey? |
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| ...but it's not going to resolve the deeper reasons why people look at Monkey and then decide to go elsewhere. What are those reasons? My experience has been that people won't even consider Monkey long enough to download the demo! |
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| Do many people even look at Monkey in the first place? Depends what you mean by many. I doubt the website sees a lot of casual traffic but Monkey has been mentioned on various forums and places like Reddit. People have looked at it and given reasons why they're put off. I don't recall anyone saying "Wow, looks amazing but I couldn't use something called Monkey" or even "I saw the name and didn't go any further". What are those reasons? * Price - "HaXe/LibGDX/whatever is free. Why pay for this?" * Features - "Sure it's cheaper than Marmalade/Corona/Unity but they offer x/y/z." * Syntax - "BASIC? You must be joking." * Credibility - "Where's an example of the sort of game I want to make that was made in Monkey?" "The demo apps are unconvincing." * Culture - Amateur/cottage-industry middle ground that fails to present as either a solid open-source project or a dependable business. I could go on. |
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| Please do go on. Seriously. It's not an issue of whether criticisms are valid, but of how to answer them. Of course it's not possible to please everyone. I can think of answers to those criticisms that satisfy me, but they won't satisfy everyone. Still, the first step to answering a question is to hear the question. Some of these things are better confronted head-on IMO. Syntax-wise, Monkey IS somewhat like a cross between Basic and Java. If that's a problem for people, it's not hard to explain why End is not actually any less sophisticated and efficient than }. As for the cottage-industry bit, why not put the history of Blitz Research right in the foreground? I thought cottage industries were supposed to be cool now. As for credible games, well, I guess we are all doing our best there! As time goes on, it can only get better. The history of Blitz could also help here. |
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| I remember Mark teasing about getting a business manager of sorts (or maybe a documentation tech writer guy?). Being a previous TGC fanboy for a decade I don't know the whole history of BRL but ever since BlitzMax came out (didn't buy it tho) I have been impressed with the quality of the Basic hybrid OOP language from BRL. Monkey is no disappointment to me. As far as how to get more people into Monkey I think Mark would either have to listen to all these good ideas and implement the best ones or get a business partner to do it for him. Someone who is savvy in 21st Century online business practices with manipulating social media hype, forum advertising and other marketing campaigns to get more people into Monkey. This person would have to make less money than they bring in though. :) |
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| I don't want to endlessly list issues, my point was really just to push back on the idea that Monkey's only problem is the name/image. However, two largish problem areas that are worth adding: * Tools - Anyone coming from more standard dev environments will be dismayed at the state of tooling for Monkey. Even if you take the high water mark of Jungle it falls well short of free tools for many other languages. * Community - There are some really talented and helpful people here but many other dev communities offer more available help and higher levels of expertise. It's a chicken and egg problem but still a problem. The thing is that much of this stuff has been gone over before. What tends to happen is that the BRL faithful miss the point about market opinion and start arguing the validity of the criticisms. Taking the syntax issue as an example, it generally results in the technical argument ("It's not really a BASIC.") or the practical equivalence/dismissive argument you were tempted by ("End is no different to curly brackets"). Both positions dodge the issue that familiarity and stylistic preference matter even if they have no foundational language design argument to support them. Monkey syntax contains many elements and constructs that are BASIC-like and that's what people will see. That choice is like deciding to make a car and only offer it in neon pink. Yes, some people like neon pink. Yes, neon pink is just another colour and doesn't fundamentally affect the utility of the car. Guess what though? Most people still don't want a neon pink car. Anyway, on a positive note things are getting better. Mark finally stuck the code on a public repo, which will help with some market segments, although I think the free version needs expanding beyond just HTML5. SlopeOak's Necrodancer project has the possibility of being a success (I think it has a good shot at Steam) that will significantly raise Monkey's profile in the indie community. |
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| If you take the name and the overall brand image (logo, website design etc.) then there's an issue of it appearing to be a language for kids thats why i squared up the monkey image. the original is cute but screams "it's for kids!" to me. Monkey syntax contains many elements and constructs that are BASIC-like and that's what people will see. can we say it's Lua-like? IMHO, the best way to spread the use of a programming language is to make cool things with it and post it. Anyway, on a positive note things are getting better. are things bad now? |
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 My latest made entirely in Inkscape this time. Link to Inkscape .svg file: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8ZVTzxxMspjM1ZaOVExeTVEOUE/edit?usp=sharing (Also, thanks to Ferdi for posting the original monkey logo in .svg format earlier) What do you think? If everyone who creates games/apps would include a reference like this word would spread about how capable monkey really is. |
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| IMHO, the best way to spread the use of a programming language is to make cool things with it and post it. True enough but there's also an aspect of BRL actually using the cool things they already have. It's been noted several times how poorly the website promotes the existing capabilities of the language and available libraries. Community activity and enthusiasm for promotion benefit from feeding. We're waiting on the proposed site redesign but it's still amazing to me that the existence of things like Monkey-Flixel, Diddy, Ignition, Spine/Spriter import and many other libraries are completely unacknowledged. My personal experience from porting Box2D was head-shaking disbelief that it was effectively ignored as a promotable feature. The same goes for things like invaderJim's tutorial videos. A community member puts a huge effort into creating something of enormous potential value for new users and do BRL leverage that? Nope. This stuff should be being pushed from the front page not being left to rot in the forum. are things bad now? I pointed out some problematic areas and that some recent events are positive moves. Whether those improvements moved the needle out of an area labelled "bad" would be somewhat subjective. |
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| Lots of really valid points above lets just hope that Mark takes it all as us wanting to help and not a punch in the face. With the website redesign underway, I think its a step in the right direction, or I hope it is, as long as its not just a new reskin of what we already have. I think what might be more productive now is to try and help mark and co lay out a roadmap of possible changes , so that they can knock them out one after another to maximize time and outcome. For example, I would focus on the site's front page first it as has been stated it needs a total rewrite. The I would open the forums up with third part forums, support for all the things on a forum internet users have come to take for granted, and have sections for public posters so potential customers can come and ask questions, talk about code they are making with the demo/lite version.. My Suggested RoadMap would look like this. 1. ReDesign Main Website 2. Launch a new feature rich forum with sections for lite users to post in. 3. Update and Rebrand the demo to Monkey, the Pro at the end is enough to seperate the paid version from the normal version, calling it free or demo can be off putting. 4. Start Advertising the Key Community Modules, on the front page show off Diddy, Flixel,Jungle, FontText and its TOOL, and BOX2D and others, with links out to their downloads and or info pages. 5. THINK!.. about rebranding EVERYTHING.. I recall one of my first posts about this here, and over on bb.com was "WTF is with the name". As for the name, Monkey has grown on me, but I like many others talk about it to colleges and the first thing out their mouths tends to be about the name. Even languages like Pearl, Ruby, Java sound mad but they still sound mature, picture java first thing that pops to mind is coffee , ruby ? something valuable, Pearl ?, again something of value, Monkey ? something cheeky, for kids. Look at Game Maker, there is absolutely no question what that is all about, hell its in the name, look at unity, makes you think of lots of things coming together, neither of them scream cheeky monkey or for kids. I can understand that Mark wanted to get away from Blitz as a name, I just think he jumped in the wrong direction. Which all begs the question, if he was to rebrand, what name would be a good choice. |
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| @ordigdug - Thanks for the contribution every little helps. @Taiphoz - I'd rename it to maybe just "Mojo" |
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| I think mojo would have been far better than monkey. |
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| Some excellent points above. I also like the idea of Monkey Free and Monkey Pro, as opposed to a demo. I also think that Invader Jim's tutorials need to be front and center. Also need to plug the BAFTA winning New Star Soccer. I also agree with Muddy and I think Necrodancer will get on Steam. I had heard about and been following it some and never knew it was in Monkey. I also think that miniB3D is getting robust enough to be listed as a feature. 3D would probably bring some folks in too. It would even be worth it if Mark couldn't work on improvements for a bit until the stuff is done. Mark, can we get an official response? |
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| What are the issues with it being called Monkey? Just out of curiosity. Some might say that "Unity" is a very weird name as its a very corporate word. I wouldn't see "marmalade" as a very professional sounding language. What about "google"? "bing"? "wii"? The name generally speaking doesn't seem to be an issue for other products/languages so I wonder if its really that bad? from an outside perspective? Of course if the language was called "CrashyBugHellHole" then that would be a different story... Maybe it is not the name but the fact that not enough people know about the name for it to be "cool" yet. The lack of marketing and product awareness is the real issue? |
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| I have never cared about the name. The only legitimate problem I have heard regarding the name is when searching for terms on google there is a lot of noise sometimes. |
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| I guess the name is personal preference, all I can say for sure is that when I am trying to tell people about monkey, the name has ALWAYS , EVERY TIME, been a hang up for them, with replies like, "Oh is that a kids thing" or "can you make real games with it ?" or my personal favorite "is that the thing by Nickelodeon" |
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| Yeah, the name always make people say "huh?". It also is a mess when looking for something monkey-related on google, specially because of jMonkeyEngine. But you guys seriously expect things to change? It's been like that since I've discovered Blitz3D (probably even since BlitzPlus)... marketing is not a strong point from brl. I really don't mind - Monkey does what I need, and that's the culprit for me. But it's a shame such good product to be unknown to the general public. |
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| I'd be really upset if the name was changed from monkey. Its the first thing that caught my attention, its got personality. It doesn't need some "marketing speak" clever name. What is needed: - Website redesigned using a responsive website template that'll work on all devices including phones; a forum for the demo users; the website needs a bullet list summery of core features and USPs. The most important thing is a flagship game that pushes monkey to the absolute limits and that is available in ALL the target platforms. It should have the monkey logo and url as a splash screen. This game should be placed on the homepage and possibly be open source. I would be up for putting a monkey logo in my games. A logo with a top banana saying "Monkey see, Monkey do", the monkey and then a bottom "made with monkey" banana would be good. |
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