Welcome back, everyone! As you can see, the new forums are live and we're all ready to go! We apologize for the long wait, but we'd like to think the wait was worth it. The staff have worked very hard to bring you an improved experience on Relic Castle. Our forum software is much more responsive, modern, and stable. We have a good handful of new, useful features that I'd like to touch on today.
Before we get to that, though, I want to give a special shout out to @Cilerba who assisted us with the re-branding of Relic Castle -- that logo at the top is his work, and we're very grateful that he was able to give us a hand. Thank you very much!
Resources & Tutorials
Part of what makes this community so great is the public resources and tutorials we create for everyone to use. Fan game developers have a plethora of excellent quality public assets to use at their disposal, and we wanted to make it even easier to find the resources you need.
Our new resources & tutorials manager will help you do just that, with multiple categories for both resources and tutorials, information on when the content was last updated, reviews to reflect the quality of the resources, and other useful information such as a credits tab and what version of Essentials it can primarily be used on. After using it, I'm sure you'll agree with me that threads pale in comparison.
We're very excited to see new content be created and displayed through this system. We'll be keeping a close eye on what type of content is frequently submitted, and expand the categories as need be.
Community Streams
Community Streams are something we're very excited to be able to include on Relic Castle! Streaming has recently become more of a prominent way to connect with the fan game community in recent years, and we're glad to be able to provide a feature that involves it in the community in a more obvious way. We hope that streaming becomes a staple in the fan game community for years to come.
If you want more information on community streams, check out our overview thread.
Discord Integration
Since September 2015, Relic Castle has had a Discord server which has brought our community closer than ever. In the past, we've had to manually approve users to chat on our Discord server, but our new forums have Discord integration which automates the approval process once you've linked your Relic Castle account to your Discord account, which is beneficial to both you and us.
If you want more information on our Discord server, check out our Discord page.
Weekly Discussions
Weekly Discussions are returning to Relic Castle as an official staff-run activity! Each month, we'll select a handful of discussion topics to reserve for weekly discussions, and through out the month we'll get a chance to discuss them at length as a community. In these discussions, feel free to talk about what has and hasn't worked for you as a fan game developer, or maybe you can chime in as a player.
If you want more information on the Weekly Discussions, check out our sub-forum.
New Badges
Badges are returning, of course. We've retired a few of them, but added even more! Some of the ones we've added should hopefully encourage general forum activity and resource contributions. Another badge related feature is that you can pick the order you want your badges to appear in your postbit.
If you want more information on badges, check out our overview thread.
And More!
There's so many more changes and additions to the forums, from direct messages replacing personal messages, to two-step verification and our new SSL certificate, to alerts being updated in real time, we hope you find your forum experience to be much improved since the old forums!
And with that, on behalf of myself and the rest of the staff, welcome back to Relic Castle!
Before we get to that, though, I want to give a special shout out to @Cilerba who assisted us with the re-branding of Relic Castle -- that logo at the top is his work, and we're very grateful that he was able to give us a hand. Thank you very much!
Resources & Tutorials
Part of what makes this community so great is the public resources and tutorials we create for everyone to use. Fan game developers have a plethora of excellent quality public assets to use at their disposal, and we wanted to make it even easier to find the resources you need.
Our new resources & tutorials manager will help you do just that, with multiple categories for both resources and tutorials, information on when the content was last updated, reviews to reflect the quality of the resources, and other useful information such as a credits tab and what version of Essentials it can primarily be used on. After using it, I'm sure you'll agree with me that threads pale in comparison.
We're very excited to see new content be created and displayed through this system. We'll be keeping a close eye on what type of content is frequently submitted, and expand the categories as need be.
Community Streams
Community Streams are something we're very excited to be able to include on Relic Castle! Streaming has recently become more of a prominent way to connect with the fan game community in recent years, and we're glad to be able to provide a feature that involves it in the community in a more obvious way. We hope that streaming becomes a staple in the fan game community for years to come.
If you want more information on community streams, check out our overview thread.
Discord Integration
Since September 2015, Relic Castle has had a Discord server which has brought our community closer than ever. In the past, we've had to manually approve users to chat on our Discord server, but our new forums have Discord integration which automates the approval process once you've linked your Relic Castle account to your Discord account, which is beneficial to both you and us.
If you want more information on our Discord server, check out our Discord page.
Weekly Discussions
Weekly Discussions are returning to Relic Castle as an official staff-run activity! Each month, we'll select a handful of discussion topics to reserve for weekly discussions, and through out the month we'll get a chance to discuss them at length as a community. In these discussions, feel free to talk about what has and hasn't worked for you as a fan game developer, or maybe you can chime in as a player.
If you want more information on the Weekly Discussions, check out our sub-forum.
New Badges
Badges are returning, of course. We've retired a few of them, but added even more! Some of the ones we've added should hopefully encourage general forum activity and resource contributions. Another badge related feature is that you can pick the order you want your badges to appear in your postbit.
If you want more information on badges, check out our overview thread.
And More!
There's so many more changes and additions to the forums, from direct messages replacing personal messages, to two-step verification and our new SSL certificate, to alerts being updated in real time, we hope you find your forum experience to be much improved since the old forums!
And with that, on behalf of myself and the rest of the staff, welcome back to Relic Castle!