Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Changing Polls

As regular visitors to Blazing Games already know, I have been using polls as an attempt to get some feedback about what I should be doing with the site. I have also been playing around with the polls in attempt to let my visitors decided at least partially where the hours I devote to the site get placed. Quite a while ago I decided that I would put a block of 10 hours a week away for working on the game. I initially decided to break this up into 5 two hour chunks that would be voted on daily, but that really didn't work well as I kept having to shift gears. This was not very productive so the time I spent working on the winning project tended to be wasted getting back into the flow of the project. I then shifted to a weekly winner that would get all ten hours. This sort of worked, except that some of the less popular games would eventually win, and I would get a bunch of work done and get excited about the project only for it to be put on the back burner. While this wasn't quite as bad as the daily blocks, it was still demoralizing. My solution was to have one visitor selected game worked on until it was finished (or at least finished to a logical milestone). So far this has worked great. So great, in fact, that I am going to keep doing this. I am, however, going to change the polls.

The game that is likely going to be chosen as the replacement project, unless there are an awful lot of votes for the second place game, is going to take a good month or so to finish. It does not make sense to have the replacement game voted on for a month before there is any winner, so instead I will be having feedback about certain aspects of the game being worked on. When the game is almost ready to post, I will have a poll for the next game. The results from prior game polls will still be cumulative.

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