One thing I have greatly enjoyed about running GameFromScratch.com over the years was getting emails like “Thank you for introducing me to _____ game engine”. GFS is actually a pretty large community at this point and the indie gaming community would be nothing without the awesome tools, frameworks and game engines available today. One of my major goals is to increase awareness of these great tools. Up until now I have done fairly piecemeal reporting on indie game development news but now I am going to be a bit more active.
So what exactly does this mean? Well it means I am going to do a great deal more smaller posts on GameFromScratch about new game development product releases to help generally raise awareness in the community. I am also going to be implementing a new tagging system here so the people that want to filter it out can! Don’t worry, GameFromScratch is going to continue with much the same content it has today, just with more news thrown in.
Of course, to report on news I need to be aware of it! This is going to be solved in a two fold manner. First I have set up a new account specifically for engine and tool developers to contact me with their game development related news. If you’ve created or updated a product, library, framework, book or engine that you think is newsworthy for indie game developers, please email [email protected] and I will do my best to report it in the timeliest manner possible assuming it is relevant. GFS gets a quarter million views or more a month composed entirely of full and prospective game developers, so it should be a great place to get the word out. There is of course a fine line between news and spam, which is why I will be keeping this a manual process.
Second, I am going to be setting up a list of resources to monitor and will periodically ( hourly, daily, weekly? all depends how resource intensive this becomes ) check for updates and report them accordingly. Of course if you run such a project and want the news out, sending it directly to [email protected] is going to have a much faster turn around, especially as the list grows larger and larger!
In the next day or two I will make the first draft of the initial projects I am going to monitor for news. Of course the coverage that matter is ultimately driven by you, so if there are projects ( some example, Tiled, LibGDX, SFML, Box2D, Lime, Unity, Substance, Maya, Blender, etc ) you want monitored for new releases, be sure to let me know! Of course too, if there are subjects you absolutely don’t want covered, let me know that too. Remember I am also going to implement a set of tags such as NEWS_POST and NOT_NEWS_POST, so you can easily filter all of this out if you have no interest at all in being updated on goings on in the gamedev world.
Any and all feedback is appreciated. I’m working on the initial list as we speak so expect it in the next day or two. If you are a game tool/engine developer and want to make sure your product is covered or you have news to report, be certain to email me. If you think this entire idea is barmy and that I’m completely insane, also let me know!
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