Comments on: In-Game Credits Screens

By: Goldstone

Goldstone — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 22:37:01 +0000

Why not have a credits screen, though? It takes only a few hours, is fun for the developers, and gives keen players another button to click and thing to watch.

Brand names aren’t irrelevant in the casual market (although portals would like to make you think they are!) – you may not be able to list your url but you can strongly hit at it

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 19:22:23 +0000

Hm, I can see credits being a useful way to show appreciation, and in a large team, I think it’s an important pat-on-the-back type thing. But when your credits are three people, it’s pretty anti-climactic.

You have to be careful when using credits to determine what games people have worked on, though. Large companies have rather arbitrary rules about who they put in credits, and they DON’T use them as proof of who worked on a game… in fact, it’s common practice to omit anybody who leaves the company more than a few months prior to the game launching. For instance, even if a developer spent two years working on Dungeons and Dragons Online, if they left three months before it shipped, they did not get in-game credit!

By: Marv Gouw

Marv Gouw — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 19:07:49 +0000

My real point is that it’s not about vanity, it’s one of the many ways you can show your appreciation to the people who’ve helped you.

By: Marv Gouw

Marv Gouw — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 19:04:47 +0000

A readme file is not the first place I look when I want to see the credits. It’s pretty common place to expect to find credits in game. And it also makes it feel more official, not some readme text that you can edit. If you trademark that you can use to brand, that’s fine, but it’s sometimes nice for artists or any other contractor to have their name on an in-game credits screen. When I’m hiring a new artist and they say that they’ve worked on a particular game, the first thing I do is fire up that game and look at the credits page. Sometimes I find out that they’ve done minor work, othertimes I see that they’ve created all the art for the game.

By: Nikos Beck

Nikos Beck — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 16:45:22 +0000

You should post this on indiegamer.com, get some community feedback.

I don’t plan on including credits because they’ll be very short. I’ll only have myself as the programmer and designer, a single artist and at least four testers. If I publish, I’ll have at least six executives to add.

I’m going to rely on my corporate identity for branding and marketing.

By: Suzie

Suzie — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 10:35:54 +0000

Agreed. It’s almost always a pointless distraction; most people aren’t interested, and unless you’ve managed to capture some huge name celebrity, it’s not going to be a selling point. I can only think of a few times I’ve actually paid attention to the credits, and that nearly always when there was something funny or different about it.