Giving & Taking Feedback
Giving & Taking Feedback
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Handling feedback politely is crucial for people to understand your points. Even if you have good feedback or good reasons to consider certain opinions, people won't care if you tell them in a rude way. This guide explains how to provide feedback and receive it politely.
Made by NauticusGD and Etherail
Required Guides: Communicating
Easy Difficulty
Medium (5-7 minutes)
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
This guide has a video version of it which you can watch here
The prior feedback guide (in the Creative Process unit) discussed how you can use feedback as part of your creative process. This one will discuss how to give and receive feedback politely.
Giving Feedback
Giving Feedback
Providing useful feedback is no easy task. You have to account for a lot of factors that the creator may or may not tell you, and explain your thoughts in a way that they understand. For that reason, we’ve compiled a list of guidelines to consider when commenting on a creator’s work.
Be Polite.
Mind your phrasing and try not to be aggressive. Remember, you’re supposed to be critiquing the level and not the creator. Saying something like “I’m not a fan of all this spam” is much better than saying “I’m not a fan of how you made the level so spammy” because the latter involves the creator, making it sound more personal.
Don’t be overbearing.
While being honest is usually the best policy you should follow, you shouldn’t overwhelm the person that asked for help. Dumping excessive amounts of criticism will probably demotivate them instead of helping them. Instead, try to focus on one major issue at a time so they can make adjustments accordingly while keeping their own vision.
Explain your reasoning and be constructive.
Randomly pointing out problems won’t help most people understand how to fix them, so try to provide solutions and justify the changes you suggest. To give an example, saying “I don't like the green in the background” is much less helpful than saying “The green in the background doesn’t really go well with the rest of the level because it stands out too much; you could use a purplish-blue instead.”
Receiving Feedback
Receiving Feedback
We've now gone through guidelines for giving feedback, so now let's discuss how you should receive feedback. This is how you can aid your reflection process and come out with a better level at the end.
Try not to argue.
It's natural to feel a bit defensive when flaws in your levels are pointed out, but arguing about it won't help you or anyone else. People who give feedback are only trying to help most of the time, after all.
Listen to the crowd
Rather than individuals. You may know someone that dislikes a specific detail that almost everyone else seems to like. Don’t get too finicky. Unless you know the person is very experienced and knows what they're doing, you should typically listen to what the majority of people say.
Conversely, don't try to please everyone.
It may do more harm than good, and lead to unintended consequences. An example of this is the controversy surrounding Doom Eternal's second DLC, which tried to please more casual and more dedicated players at the same time but ended up angering both.
It's important to keep your target audience in mind, because if you try to please everybody, you may end up pleasing nobody. Use feedback in a way that aligns with your goals and basic concepts, and consider how your target audience will view the level.
Explain what you want.
In most cases, explaining your goals for your level will give you more relevant advice from others. Try sharing details on what you're asking for feedback on, and be sure to clarify what's unfinished even if it seems obvious to you. Is there something you've tried that didn't work out? Maybe others will find a workaround you didn't think of.
Feedback in GD
Feedback in GD
Geometry Dash has two different player types; creators who make levels, and players who play them. As a creator, you will most likely ask for feedback from other creators. This is good since they'll have editor experience and can likely make more relevant suggestions. However, you shouldn't limit yourself to getting feedback from creators. For example, if you want feedback on your gameplay, it may be better to ask an experienced player to playtest your level to get a sense of how fun and fair it is.
Getting feedback is another issue entirely, but not an impossible one to fix. Social media is probably your best bet, since you'll be able to reach far more people than you can in real life. Discord in particular usually offers the best feedback experience as there are lots of GD servers and many of them have channels specifically for feedback. The feedback channels come with a guarantee on feedback as well.
Once you find where you'll ask for feedback, knowing what to get feedback on is a very important skill. Do you want feedback on the gameplay? Ask for that then! Do you want feedback on the design? Go ahead! Once you've gotten a few responses, compile them and decide how they'll affect your level. If you're really unsure about a change, you can test it out on a copy. However, you do not have to implement every change that's suggested to you.
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