GMIndie and GMVision Game Maker Survey: Poorly Implemented
August 30, 2010
GMIndie and GMVision have launched ‘Game Maker Survey 2010’ a collection of 60 questions designed to ask about your usage of Game Maker and collect opinions on various aspects of Game Maker.
I waited a couple of days after I first saw (and started but did not finish) the survey to see if others shared my opinions on the survey. I did not want to be accused of undermining a project produced by a site some may view as a competitor to Game Maker Blog by voicing my thoughts on the survey before criticism had arisen elsewhere.
I thought the survey was extremely poorly designed. Some questions don’t let me give the answer I would like to whilst at least one other, question 57 (see below), has two answers which mean exactly the same thing.
And apparently you either “know GML” or “don’t know GML” with no middle ground.
If you start the questionaire you are required to answer all 60 questions even though, as stated by robert680, some of the questions assumed you use Game Maker 8 despite an earlier question asking which version of the software you currently use.
There have been many other criticisms of individual questions and the general style of the survey, some comments taken from the Game Maker Community are listed below.
“Ok the survey had two kinds of questions:
What’s your favourite color? (Who needs this information?)
Aren’t all the useless features that are in Game Maker all useless? And aren’t stupid Yoyogames doing everything wrong? (Answer options: “a) Yes, b) Yes, but not often”.)”
– Tepi“The quiz has some design flaws and its usefulness is suspect. For example you must choose a single GM version. I use GM8 and GM4Mac. You are forced to answer every question, though some don’t apply. Having a N/A, for some questions is important. Some questions are subjective and won’t have concise meaning to every one. For example, “How often do you save your project?”, the choices are meaningless.”
– NakedPaulToast“Have answered it, though I should imagine about half my answers are inaccurate because there wasn’t an option for my own response.”
– NAL
[gmc topic]
This survey, which GMIndie list 6 people as contributing to, needed more thought put into it before it was released. Like I’ve mentioned before when offering so many different ‘products’ the quality will suffer. I am unsure of the level of involvement from GMVision (who haven’t released anything since May,) it appears their contributions may be limited to promoting the survey and providing two of the questions.
[…] of Game Maker Survey 2010 (GMB) Earlier GMB comments on implementation of the survey (Jack’s post about Stencyl […]
[…] I wondered why GMVision, creators of a Game Maker video show and previously the GMLive Game Maker radio, had collaborated with the over-ambitious GMIndie to run the recent poorly implemented Game Maker Survey. […]
I was offered to do this survey, and the idea seemed reasonable enough. When I was shown the rough draft it was pretty bad, I gave a list of stuff I wanted fixed (spelling, wording and such) and allot of it was, but there is still a bit that was not 🙁
I also was feeling the length at times…
They have uploaded a revised version of the survey apparently having the “useless questions removed”, but there are still a few things that could be improved. E.g. questions 15 and 16 could easily be the same question.
Question 24 (asking what genres you like to create) should really be a multiple question to allow more than one genre and not a “Mixtures of some of the above”.
I was pretty disappointed with the level of thought put into the survey. At first the cutesy answers merely annoyed me. Later I felt like it was only good for a laugh. Too often I was unable to answer in a way I wanted to.
Hmm, great idea, sadly the execution is poor. It makes me want to create a better one…
Just remembered.
GMLScriptsGMTutorials held a survey back in 2006/2007. Some of the results can be seen here: http://gmtutorials.com/statistics/I had nothing to do with that. Perhaps you meant GM Tutorials.
Sorry! I did.
I saw a post on another site about this a few days ago. It said “Game Maker Survay”. I cringed.
Blech.
Ok, I’m one of the main members in the GMVision team and I hadn’t heard about this survey till it was released. I, like yourself, got about 30 questions in them got too bored to continue.
Too many questions, with too little personalization.
*laughs evilly*
I also felt that the survey was a bit on the long side. I know they wanted to cover a lot, but 60 questions is a bit big.
However, I am glad that they responded to criticism by updating the survey. It’s not great, but they made many improvements including fixing some of the problems written above.
EDIT: Sorry, didn’t see Grabeorama’s comment until after I commented.