For the last couple of years, we've been on auto-pilot (development wise) on tsumea, settling on a smaller focus for the site. A bunch of the features that we've had since the site began (news, articles, events, media, and games listing) were removed and others were cut back (the developers listing). The main focus was put on jobs and social features like following members and favouriting their works.
The jobs section on tsumea is great, it's without a doubt still the most useful part of the site. The popular jobs on tsumea these days get three to four times more views than those posted over a decade ago, during the height of the industry before the GFC hit and there's clearly still a huge and rising demand for jobs in the local games industry.
But over last few the years, I've pondered and thought over some of the features that were removed and how they could be reimplemented back but with a much more useful purpose. I also questioned where tsumea fit in todays world where nearly twenty years ago there was no place to easily find jobs, news, or community for the local industry, but now there are many.
As we get close to twenty years since tsumea was launched, I feel that with the return and reimplementation of some features, we have a particular purpose to expand upon. I guess the key word here is Creditation. With the new games and events section, they return with the feature of creditting the people who worked on them. If you ever worked on a game, it should show up on your profile page on tsumea. If you ever volunteered or helped organise a conference or event, you should be acknowledged for your efforts, and this can be one way to receive that.
Games
- any logged in member can post a game entry
- if the game is on Steam or the App Store, then we have a handy importer that will grab the images and text from the store page to tsumea. All you need is the app's unique id number which is in the url of the store page
- if it's not on Steam or App Store (like itch.io, console, your website etc), then you can add the data and upload the images yourself the usual way
- once the game has been posted, any logged in member can simply click to have themselves listed on the game page as part of the team who worked on the game and choose what capacity they worked (as a producer, 3D artist, or designer etc)
- that game will appear on that member's profile page as a title they worked on, and they will appear in the credits on the game's page
Events
- any logged in member can post an event page, all that's needed is some basic information like dates, a logo, and a promo picture
- members can mark themselves as attending the event, or if they took part in organising or volunteering for the event, it's a simple click away
- games developers and organisations (including educational institutions) can mark themselves as exhibiting a game at the event (particularly to one like PAX AUS). Additionally, members can mark themselves as being part of the team exhibiting the game there
- if members took part in the event as a speaker, they can post about their talk via their dashboard and it'll appear on the events page. Additionally, other members can mark themselves as attending the talk. In the future we could provide this area as a place for direct feedback to the talk session.
- as with the games section, any thing you mark yourself as on this page will show up on your profile page, so other members can handily see which events you attended, volunteered at, or contributed to, and games will display the events they've been exhibited at as well
- all the above can apply to events that have passed, so if you see an event like GCAP 2019 on the event page and you attended it or was a speaker for it etc, you can still have it listed on your profile page for that
- in the future, a feature could be implemented where games and members can be listed for the awards they receive at events on their pages
All the features are up and active, if you're ready to start trying them out, go for it. if you run into any issues, please let me know! There are numerous other features we've had on the site that I would like to talk more about like the Game Devlog section, but I'll leave it to another time.
