Adding credits for people besides testers?

Authoring
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I thought this question might have been asked already, but if so, I’m not finding it.

Aside from crediting testers, is it also expected to credit people who respond to coding questions or design questions on the forum?

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In my experience, no, not unless the contributions are really significant (like a full code review or a new extension—and in many systems, a new extension will add itself to the credits automatically).

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There’s nothing stopping you from doing so, but I don’t think it’s expected. It would be hard to draw the line … if you’re including people who helped to answer specific questions which came up during the writing of your game, should you also include people who answered questions in the past that helped you learn how your development system worked? What about people who helped with your previous game, thereby helping you get to the point where you could write this one?

Some people put in a generic “thanks to all the helpful people on the Intfiction forums” or similar.

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I included this in the credits of Repeat the Ending:

I relied heavily on the collected wisdom of the Interactive Fiction Community Forum (intfiction.org) and frequently searched it for answers to my many, many questions about Inform 7.

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I did not know this! I kind of just assumed people put in all names of people who helped them. Well thinking about that now, in a lot of cases, that would be a real lot of names (me included!)

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I would say “beta testers” who require credit have actually played the game and provided feedback privately, not just looked at posted dummy code in the forum and provided suggestions.

That’s not to say you can’t credit someone who provided a lot of useful feedback on the forum, but in general code-advice is different from testing.

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I usually credit:

  1. This forum
  2. Anyone who contributed more than a fifth of the ideas in the game
  3. Whoever made the game engine
  4. Whoever made the underlying library (if separate from the game engine)
  5. Whoever made any additional plugins or libraries
  6. Testers
  7. Anyone who successfully convinced me that giving up was a bad idea
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Thanks, everyone!

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