Visionaire homemade Documentation & Template problems: An Endless Story?

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I believe we do have a facebook page (mostly in German though).

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International.

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The wiki however was setup by myself & David (BigStans) using mediawiki cms & bootstrap.

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We need to change the forum's interface. I've seen adventurefans forum and this forum run at the same time. Is that necessary? Outdated and confused.

Only Deponia. We need more. Lee suggested other games but... we need something more bigger than Deponia. We shouldn't rely on Deponia.

That trial version is kinda buggy anyway. You can see many reports in this forum.

All your problem can be covered just by popularity.

PR? Devs don't need to do pr if so many people use the software.

Social media? People always want to show something, if they are able to handle VS suitably. Trial's ten rooms are old-fashioned style.

Showcase? It's the point I agree. We need specific forum to promote our games. Well... this forum is not only place to show something. IndieDB, Steam... etc. But I agree with your opinion.

OK, I read the comments and I'm kinda stumped. Let me start by saying that I'm working for PC only and so did not have the cost of a Mobile license.
I agree that documentation should be completed, but I also see the immense effort done by the developers and moderators, like AFRLme, to help and explain any gaps in the arguments.
At the end, without complete documentation I used little time to understand how Vis works, with just a little patience.
Visionaire it's specifically designed and presented as a tool to allow everyone, even non-programmers like me, to create their own adventure ... and this is true.
Try to use other engines... they say "easy to use" ... no way! And are all oriented to 3D, so creating a 2D game becomes a suicide announced. ... If you're not a programmer ...
I'm not complaining about the way things are, I sometimes clash with some detail but I always received aid, by both the community and the developers themselves.
A Pro version would cut the legs to small teams like ours, without funds or kickstarter campaigns, so I prefer a low cost, rather than an unattainable, just because there is an ad hoc documentation
Maybe I'm biased, but in our small way we try to help this beautiful program advertising it in any review of our game. Don't become a AAA game but at least we'll know to as many people as possible the existence of this tool.
The only comments I can make is that, in order to have more free games, maybe the rooms could become at least 20 to allow the creation of free graphic adventure games a little longer and engaging. And I agree in part with showcase, because you just make an article which presents the game and is now featured in the news

I like it short:
- We do have a facebook site. It's completely in english. We're even promoting your games there
- We do have several great Video Tutorials, made by our great users
- We do have one of the simplest engines on the market and we hear every day about this point. It should be easy to learn the basics just by watching the videos.
- We've provided a couple of great demogames recently
- We do have amazing references. Commercial ones and free games. You can search and find some if them on indieDB. This might be the place for you if you are a developer
- We always do our very best to provide great news, features, support of operating systems and updates

This is all we can do... and I think it's a lot. And we are very very thankful for people like Lee. Especially Lee is investing a lot of time in providing help.

The other planned stuff (like documentation, more templates, forum, showrooms) just has to wait until we find the time. Please also see what I wrote in one of the earlier posts.

Englisch kann ich verstehen, aber ich kann mich in Englisch nicht gut ausdrücken. Ich möchte aber trotzdem in diesem Thread einen Beitrag schreiben.
Visionaire ist ein großartiges Programm. Ich bin gerade dabei, ein großes Projekt abzuschließen. Die Dokumentation, die ich benutzt habe, hat mir oft Hilfestellungen gegeben. Aber: Es fehlt in der Tat ein ganz ausführliches Tutorial.
Ich habe erst jetzt, nach ungefähr 5 Jahren Arbeit an meinem Projekt, angefangen, die Feinheiten des Editors zu verstehen. Heute würde ich ganz anders anfangen und viele Fehler vermeiden, viele Stunden mit Fehlersuche nicht mehr machen müssen.
Allerdings scheint mir auch wichtig zu sein, dass man im Laufe der Beschäftigung mit Visionaire merkt, dass einiges, was im editor zur Verfügung steht, nicht wirklich funktioniert.

Einige bedeutsame Klippen:
- Kopien, die Variablen oder Werte enthalten führen im Verlauf des Spiels zu völlig unerklärlichen seltsamen Verhalten und Abläufen. Der dementsprechende Gebrauch müsste z.B. von den Entwicklern erklärt werden, damit man nicht erst Wochen auf der Suche nach Problemen ist, die sonst gar nicht entstehen würden.
- Arbeitet man mit (den oft die Abläufe vereinfachenden) Bereichsaktionen, so muss man unbedingt wissen, dass man sofort speichern muss, den Editor beenden und neu starten sollte, wenn man dort etwas gemacht hat. Kommt man nämlich später zu einer Bereichsaktion zurück, stürzt der Editor todsicher ab.
- Wenn erklärt würde, dass man mit Werten in den fast allermeisten Fällen viel besser arbeiten kann als mit Bedingungen, würde alles ebenfalls deutlich erleichtert und verkürzt. Da das nicht erklärt wird, macht man eben viele, nein: sehr viele negative Erfahrungen, die unnötig viel Zeit kosten.
- Wenn erklärt würde, dass eine sorgfältige Dokumentation der Variablen und Werte die Programmierung erleichtert, vor allem bei der Fehlersuche hilft, wäre ebenfalls viel geholfen.
Vielleicht fällt euch noch mehr dazu ein.

Trotzdem: Mein Projekt ist ohne eine einzige Zeile lua ausgekommen. Im Forum hat man mittlerweile den Eindruck, dass man ohne lua gar nicht auskommt. Nichts gegen das Engagement von AFRlme, aber gerade er stößt sicherlich viele vor den Kopf, die den Versprechungen der Entwickler, ein einfaches und skriptfreies Programm zur Verfügung zu stellen, glauben.

Visionaire ist (relativ) einfach! Es ist mit Sicherheit das einzige Programm auf dem Markt, mit dem man ohne Skripten ein komplettes Adventure programmieren kann. Aber es braucht auch viel Geduld zum Lernen und Kenntnisse von bestimmten Klippen (s.o.). In den Anfangszeiten (vor 7 Jahren) wurde im Forum auch fast nur auf dieser Ebene (skriptfrei) gefragt und „geholfen“.

Hey there,
Since this seems to be a recent and often discussed topic i thought i will throw in some thoughts of mine:


First of all: this is a project they make in their free time and not as a fulltime project. We can't expect that they develop things in time ranges that companies do. They are a small team and maybe this is also one of the issues right now.
On the one hand it would be great if they could expand their team and search for help. But its hard to find someone who would fit into the team, maybe do it for free (i dont know how they handle their internal budget when earning from licenses) and also integrate him in their workflow. What would take more time: work in a smaller team or find, integrate and introduce further teammembers? I dont know the answer. Regarding the development team i think it doesnt matter. All in all the devs right now should try to release small hotfixes here and then instead of waiting weeks and months to release the next "big build".
As for the community management, website, documentation i would suggest that they try to search for help in the community itself. I think the whole presentation of VS could be better in a lot of aspects like news articles, showcase, download section, forum(functions), wiki and community management itself.
When i go to the website as a new user which wants to create a game it is very blurrish how to navigate to the things i want to reach. Going to the "shop" is irritating when i only want templates or demo projects. Also a lot of stuff is outdated or dead. I would suggest to overhaul the whole shop and differentiate the showcase projects/Scripts/etc and the vs licenses.

Also i would suggest to add some more people to the community staff. Which means:

community management - contests, polls, news articles, communicate directly with vs team and also be an active member in the forums

Wiki - lets admit that clark needs some help here to get stuff done...

Website - hmm yeah... I know you guys use your own cms and stuff. Did all the design and code by yourself. Great work so far. I know what i am saying because i also develop websites . As mentioned above i think the whole (web) presentation should also be a bit more sexy. The userexperience here is reduced to the forum which is a bit sad. I dont know if the groups are really been used but i experienced them as unneccessary.

Documentation - do it! This is a thing a normal user cant solve because we don't know each aspect of the engine like you guys from the vs team. All the stuff the community knows seems to be a mixture of some "first step" pdfs, youtube videos, incomplete wiki and a lot of try+error with the help from the forums.

Examples - I know that a Documentation and a wiki cant and shouldnt replace examples or step by step instructions. A wiki is not a manual to how to program exactly my game. But we could provide a lot of community driven Downloads and examples for all kind of things. The download/shop right now is poorly filled. Lets change that...

It suprises me that the devs try to stick with the point they are only doing a hobby project here. In fact, developing and selling a Software to customers is not a hobby. It's a business! And therefore you have a responsibility to your paying customers. If you don't have the time and staff to take that responsibility there are two options: Get more people into the team, or transform Visionaire into an open-source project, where everyone in the community can contribute.

@battlefox: "Hobby project" was the wording of other users here.

For the most of us it started as a hobby but it became a pretty serious project during the last years. A very successful one if you think of games like Deponia 1-3, STASIS, Whispered World, Paradigm, Night of the Rabbit, and many more.

We go and continue our way - like we always did! And I wrote before what we are intending to do...

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Documentation - do it! This is a thing a normal user cant solve because we don't know each aspect of the engine like you guys from the vs team. All the stuff the community knows seems to be a mixture of some "first step" pdfs, youtube videos, incomplete wiki and a lot of try+error with the help from the forums.

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This isn't quite true. I'm not a developer, nor do I know the ins & outs of how the engine works internally. I haven't used tutorials or documentation to learn or write about what I know. It's mostly comprised of a logic based approach to understanding the engine. Everything I know (editor side) I've mostly figured out myself, that includes the Lua side of the engine, although Simon & Alex have both provided me with information in regards to new Lua functions & features when they get added to the engine.

I believe anyone on here could provide documentation (well to a degree) if they really wanted to give up some of their spare time to do so. Both andiliddell & redspark have given up plenty of their spare time to provide us with some nice video tutorials which are available on youtube & Jame's (redspark) recently mentioned that he plans on making some more video tutorials in the near future.

Everything falls down to time & what time allows. Sure Thomas & Alex could probably find new members for the dev team or for the documentation / community management side of things but that in itself is not very easy to do as it's all down to trust. For the dev side they would have to know that a: you are a more than capable programmer in C++ & various other languages & that b: you aren't going to leak or steal the engine source code.

Just let anyone write something at Wiki. I think there is only a few chance to get it vandalised.

VS is popular... and prosperous... Let's see some articles.

http://www.slant.co/topics/1907/~game-engines-for-beginners-...

This guy made one article to suggest some good game engines for beginner. BUT! VS isn't listed. Even there is Construct 2 and Gamesalad or other minor engines but no VS at all.

Is this guy a bloody idiot to overlook VS or VS is not popular?

This guy also wrote the article about best 2D game engines.

http://www.slant.co/topics/341/~2d-game-engines/

Oh~~~ there is Adventure Game Studio and other too many game engines. But no VS.

Next.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/20/the-top-10-engines-that-ca...

This guy made the list for top 10 easy game engines but VS isn't listed.

Next.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/the-top-14-game-engines-t...

Same as above examples.

Next.

https://www.nyfa.edu/student-resources/how-to-make-a-game-wi...

5 games engines that don't need any programming skill! How wonderful. But there is no VS as well.

People don't know VS. Probably German people know it but not world-widely.

And VS does not deserve this mistreat. It's really beginner friendly tool. In order to let those people aware of VS, some actions should be done.

Correct DEShini. Some actions should be done. But theres work for the devs first. When you first heard about Visionaire and go to this website. You first realize the news weren't updated since July 2015. Then you try to find free example games to try out. Half of them won't find them cuz the free ones are in the area called shop. And half of them have broken links.

Once these basics are fixed it would be easier to recommend Visionaire to new people I think.

Hi ! First of all sorry for my bad English...
I'm a brand new user of Visionaire Editor, and I just started to explore all possibilities. What a nice software !

I must admit that the lack of documentation is something slightly off-putting, but I feel that there is still a small community animated by the desire to share his great knowledge.

I'll see later if I have a logical mind enough to get by with all the subtleties inherent in the development of an adventure game packed with puzzles... and how to code them !

I quite agree to think that Visionaire lacks the popularity of other engines, but it is not unknown for so many. Just browse some forums for noticing. It is just 'badly known'.

Anyway, I'm worried about something : I just learned a whole new editor would emerge within two months, so... will there be a compatibility problem with my current project ? Should I wait before I start, so as not to start from scratch ?

Thanks a lot for reading and answer !