I wanna talk more about this later, but thought I'd give a short thread about designing your game around community development!

The basic concept is that the game you make communicates values that will ultimately shape the community you that grows around your game

Every game (and every media for that matter) communicates a value system. One choice is to actively make design choices with that effect on community in mind, but the other use is to at least know what you will have to actively work around when building your community.

Example: For Calico, the values in our game are incredibly clear. We have pronouns stated in character bios in game (including they/them), and I've found that the effect on our discord is significant. The discord is immediately very pro trans, and accepting of they/them pronouns

It's likely we could have fostered this value system in our community either way over time, but instead it was able to grow that way with very little intervention because the game itself fostered it. (this is the game working as one of your community managers)

Now, a more difficult situation is when your game design does not match the community rules you would like to foster. Over simplistic example: Let say your game has nudity in it, but you don't want users in your community posting NSFW pictures. -

- This is going to have to be VERY clearly communicated to user base, and probably corrected many times. There is nothing wrong with making a game that allows more from its characters than it does real ppl, but if you think about this beforehand it will be much easier to handle

This is a very basic look at it, but the biggest takeaway is to at least keep this in the back of your head during design. "What will I be communicating to future community here? Is that intentional? What will I need to be prepared for if we grow a large community? (more mods?)"