At 04:49 AM 9/25/00 -0700, John Saeger wrote:
>Yes but focus on the 2600. There are probably a half a million wannabe game
>programmers that are doing other stuff and a gazillion web sites already
>serving their needs. You don't really have a snowballs chance of making an
>impact. There's a market all right but its already being well taken care
>of.
I'm really not aware of a generalized "developer network" site that caters
to game developers specifically in a project-centric way (like Sourceforge,
for example.) I also think that making a site with a name like
"gamedeveloper.net" exclusive to 2600 development would be a tragic waste
of a hard-won domain name. No, I think 2600 should just be another
category on the site - if this list were moved to it, at least it would
start off busy ;)
Maybe some kind of hierarchical setup is in order, like
gamedeveloper.net
news (front page, weblog style with sidebars)
news discussion forums (linked with Kaffeeklatsch below)
commercial games
(most have their own PR and wouldn't need an official
project page per se, but another outlet to reach fans
is always nice, so this is really for commercial projects
not under the gamedeveloper.net umbrella)
its own news (basically to keep non-developer news
out of the main news)
obligatory magazine-like coverage (reviews, hints etc.)
(just because most game developers also love games)
mod development
community (bug commiseration, patch notification etc.)
clan/ladder home pages (huge overlap between mod developers
and clan members)
etc...
open projects, clearly categorized by license terms
(e.g. commercial, GPL, free binary, etc.) ala freshmeat.net
windows
(genres under each platform...)
multiplatform
linux
mac
retro
-------->if this is a good site, I could easily see at least
the 2600/amiga/vectrex/c64/NES sections getting big
tools, clearly categorized as above
game construction sets
rapid game development kits
libraries
components
etc...
tech
hardware talk
3d bilinear z-order tri-filtering stuff ;)
audio
assembly is your friend!/enemy!
ideas on optimizing
etc...
contests
retro game of the month
free-software game of the month
multi-platform game of the month
or something...
kaffeeklatsch
aspirations
bitch board
hints and tips
show coverage
getting distributed
etc...
search
about
etc... the mandatory stuff we never look at
I'm sure Glenn('s company) is way past this point already in designing his
new site but if I were starting a new BBS or community site about game
development, this is something like how it would look. There's plenty of
room for retro coders to mix with hobbyists or small coder groups
developing for current machines. Many of the fora I suggest exist
elsewhere but sometimes the whole can be greater than the yadda yadda yadda.
Of course, then there are the inducements to get developers to move their
projects there, based on critical mass. Free disk space and a CVS tree
(plus whatever Windows developers use this week - Sourcesafe maybe if you
can do it over the net) is a good start for the current machines, this list
would just be transplanted over I suppose, and covering commercial games is
really just a matter of getting a bunch of ringers to start off reviewing
the games until you get enough eyeballs (and contributed reviews) and
become important enough that they just start sending you advance copies
(think of Ain't It Cool News, crossed with Slashdot.)
Obviously everyone who wants to participate actively will have to make an
account of some kind and so you get targeting ability. For example, I
assume this was the intent of the atari.net addresses they gave out, but
mine has been pretty spam free and I don't get to their nasty yellow site
too often and it's always showing a sort of attractive banner ad for
colecovision.com anyway.
Makes me wanna start my own game coder site ;) Except I hate subjecting
people to banner ads and cookies and thus I would have no business model.
Apologies for being only marginally 2600-related.
Rob
kudla@xxxxxxxxx ... http://kudla.org/raindog ... Rob
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