June 1 Mag Update

We've been working hard getting advertisers, articles, and an interview. Unfortunately we have missed our deadline to put the publication out for June 1. The publication will be linked here with a full update as soon as it happens. We apologize, but two maning a magazine publication with 5 articles has turned out to be a bit more work that originally thought. Top it all off with Real Life interfering with some of the workload itself as well and you have a later than planned publication.

Please hold tight and hopefully we'll get it out soon.

Magazine Update

Things at GCZine have been buzzing coming up on our deadline for the June 1st issue. We have a good collection of 5 articles covering varying topics that were breifly discussed on the blog here. You can expect a Tools of the Trade at $0 type of article as well as a web presence gentle tips article. The web presence article is planned to continue on beyond this first issue to cover more ground. I'm going to put up another poll relevant to the magazine. I want to be able to do some preleminary reports to our advertisers at GameDev, Garage Games, and Cartoonsmart.

Cheers!

You need web presence...

Due to the amount of design work I'm currently doing between our new site, the magazine, a companies website, three sports team sites, my other business website, a gaming guild website, and a couple browser based games....... I've been digging up some interesting stuff. One site I've come across is particularly nice. It has alot of freebie tuts, but has a plus membership with many many more. The site is the Tuts Plus network. There is section for photoshop tutorials, vector tutorials , net tuts, audio tuts, flash tuts, and ae tuts (after effects). There are tutorials for everything from logo design to websites from scratch. Photoshop digital painting to photo enhancing. I have even come across a design process tutorial for a couple things. I haven't gone across all the network yet sticking mostly to PSDTuts+ and NETTuts+ mostly.

This I feel is a very valuable resource for even game creators due to a web presence for their projects and their team. If you don't look the part of a professional why would anyone believe you are. I'm cutting blogs short as longer more in depth articles will be going into the first issue of the magazine coming June 1st 2009. Unfortunatley for you guys I can't go dumping all my wisdom and knowledge out on the internet at the usual rate so that I have something to offer to you in the magazine. I also have another writer, who is also an original follower of the blog, working on the magazine for me. We are hoping to release about a 14 page magazine to start carrying 4 articles, a featured developer article, and some helpful advertisments. We'll be making a huge deal about it here on the blog which will eventually point at the new website when it is completed and the blog will then seize further growth.

A time for growth!

GCZine has began pulling resources to work up our first printed issue. We do not have a release date, but will notify everyone once it becomes available. Also in the works is an official site that is not a freebie blogger site. We will be working on a weekly released E-Version that will grant members a single news feed article a week most likely. This site will become the official home and this blog will be no longer used once it goes live. Some minor features hoping to be placed in the folds include:
Weekly Articles
RSS News Feeds on the site from other major game dev sites
Focused advertisment from the companies you want to see
Events calendar centralizing schedules of multiple events to one spot for your convenience
The Editors Blog
Still under consideration are a Forum and Competitions

GCZine will most likely be keeping its name for the growth although some name changes were considered. We are hoping to keep this dream alive and growing so we can continue to provide you with information, education, and entertainment from the indie dev communities. We will be putting forth an affordable marketing campaign to encourage new members to join our ranks. I am looking at several publisher opportunities and do not know how the subscription of the magazine will precisley work, but details will come as they are available.

Thanks for your support so far and we hope everyone can keep us moving.

Are you part of the Nethernet?

I have had a rough weekend with my son being bitten by a dog and then I have gotten strep throat. In the meantime due to some of the spare time this provided me with I was able to finally test drive a game that truly got my attention from out of nowhere. The game at this time requires you to use FireFox and is an add on/toolbar for the browser. It transforms your browser into a sort of passive game. You level in certain classes that can provide you with special abilities. It layers on top of existing websites allowing you to leave awsms or attacks, place guard dogs, build quests or do them, and even portals to other sites. you earn data points and pings based upon activity which allow you to purchase the tools as well as armor upgrades etc. I've been amused by the game and have it running on all my computers just to get a little extra out of it. So check it out at http://www.thenethernet.com/

Back in the office!

I'm back in the office from my vacation and happy to be back. Unfortunately I was limited to my access to the internet so I do not have an article to provide the readers that are showing up regularly. Until I can pull in more writers I will be easing back the deadlines for articles to every other week rather than every week. This will hopefully allow me to cover a greater circle of information with less rushed articles. I am by no means a professional writer and want to provide everyone with the highest quality articles I can. I am talking with several Indie Dev's like myself about becoming writers for GCZine. This will not only allow me to work more on the sites future development away from a blog site to a true domain with magazine formatting and advertisements. I am planning on posting a poll to determine our traffic and to see what kind of regular visiting I can expect. Please fill out this poll honestly and I hope you continue to visit us.

Happy Easter!

I will be going to Massachusetts over the Easter break. I will be out of town from the 9th - 13th so next weeks post may be delayed. The holidays for some reason get me thinking about the current industry genre standard. Whats the top genre right now? What sells the best today? What are the predictions for the future of said genre?

A personal analysis would probably have you guessing the MMORPG is still the top genre for games. I don't believe this is so. It does make a lot of money when done correctly and marketed properly, but I don't think it is an industry leading genre. FPS are still high on the totem poll in popularity because they are quick, action packed, and multi player. RTS seem to have tapered off a bit taking a lot of Sim style games with them. RPG is still a popular choice for those of use who like long stories with heavy adventure and extended playability and replayability. You have a new breach of RPG which feels like a FPS would which I personally deem Army Killers. You play a character that can take out dozens upon dozens of enemies in a single swing of his/her sword. So I started digging. There has to be a demographic that can hint to us, the independant developers, what we should be looking at doing.

Believe it or not finding a demographic for game genres is not an easy task at all. After reading several dozen sites I wasn't that surprised to see that Platformers and Fighting games have fallen to almost the bottom of the charts along with vehicle sims (flight/racing/etc.). MMORPG is still high on the charts as are RPG, Action, and Action Adventure games. FPS is pretty close to topping it out from various readings. Puzzle games are hot and get alot of attention. Take advantage of XNA being Windows, XBox, and Zune friendly and you can take advantage of the xna creator club to make some money. All in all this is still my opinion as I couldn't find a true demographic to go by. If anyone has more luck than me in finding something feel free to email me and it will be linked from the site.

Thanks all and have a Happy Easter.

Simple yet functional...

A little bit of time spent customizing a default blogger template has set me on a style I can live with for now. This will allow the site to provide what I want it to and allow me to focus on articles and working on the full site. I have given myself a year to build a custom site to house us more comfortably. In the meantime I will hopefully have the review articles for at least Truespace and hopefully Blender 3D soon.

GCZ Theme

We are not happy with our current theme of choice and do not like any of the preset themes blogger provides. We will be working on a new theme tonight which may hinder our weekly article. This is all to provide you a better experience without inconvenient issues and annoying ads. All the companies that we support have asked me not to put banners, but instead add them to a link list. You will be happy to find a GCZ Reccommended Site list being developed on the side bar. Look for it in the very near future

Please Sign Up!

In order to see how many people we have showing up please sign up. It would be great to see more people in the followers section. Help us grow!

Indie Dev Freebie list!

As an independent developer we are faced with many more difficulties that large corporations can usually do with ease. At the same time we don't have the stress from the public or producers to get things out. I feel one of our major tribulations are the cost of reliable and functional tools on the market for independent developers. We are constantly wanting to use things like 3DS Max and Photoshop as well as professional development tools such as Visual Studio Pro. Sometimes you even fall into the downfall of the cost of learning something new. I am currently working on reviews of open source and free software that Indie Dev's get to work with that claim to allow us to do what the pros do.

On the list of alternatives are:
Visual Studio Express tools such as VC# Express and VC++ Express. Truespace and Blender 3D for 3D development and GIMP for 2D and Textures development. Too many of us have considered pirated software to grant us full power and control. This is not a good solution for our part of the industry because legal concerns are above and beyond the costs of just buying the software.

As far as SDKs we have obvious choices that are all free of charge including, but not limited to, XNA, OpenGL (if you can figure out their new site), DirectX, SDL, and Allegro. For those that do not know SDL and Allegro are modules built on top of the OpenGL technology I believe and provide a nice library for starter games, but from personal experience I think there is too much overhead that generates a heavy bulk on your code with larger games.

Free Education is everywhere if you know where to look, especially for the free stuff. Blender and Truespace have a larger community with tutorials right on their sites. GIMP has many resources throughout the Internet to learn the software. Visual Studio simply requires some free tutorials on the language of choice, but I will always recommend grabbing a few reference books from your local borders. OpenGL, DirectX, and XNA all have excellent books out on the market and plenty of tutorials if your willing to sit down and do them. Assuming you can get your hands on GLuT (an OpenGL collection) then GameDev.net has an excellent noob to pro tutorial by NeHe on their site. GameDev.net has many articles covering many topics for every aspect of game development.

A point I haven't had much chance to touch on yet is sound for games. I have done a little digging for this and have found simplistic programs like TabIt and Audacity can help you create simple but effective music for your games. I will continue looking for more applications similar to Fruity Loops in the free software world, but haven't found anything quite like that yet.

I am actively learning the two 3D software applications right now to give full reviews on them hopefully within the next week. Mondays article has not been decided upon yet, but I have a few ideas up in the air. Look for more coming soon.

TIGForums - Cockpit Competition

I haven't followed this much yet and do not have a lot of personal opinion on this. I found out about it a day late and a dollar short, but it has added another source to the GCZine. I will be delving into this community a little more to see what they are about and have laying around for me to pick through. GD.NET had mentioned this below the GDC 2009 coverage so I thought bringing it to our attention would be a great idea. Without reading anything it looks like the object is to build a cockpiut game like a racer or flight sim type game. Judging by some titles there are a lot of interesting concepts that have alot of humor.

Glancing over some of the entries first pagers permitted me some screenshots. Feel free to jump in and check them out here.

I will see if I can spare some time to throw in an off-day article that covers a bit more from this competition before it ends. I will definatley try to throw out the final results when it is over as well.

GDC 2009

I have just recently begin heavy reading on the GDC 2009 and have been learning a little bit as I move through my resources. I've dug around in the press photos, but not particularly ready to post anything yet. Pictures of people talking or listening to people talk are not exciting to me so I doubt they will be to my audience. Direct from the GDC website I have pulled some links that might interest the group.

GDC Links:
http://twitter.com/Official_GDC
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Game-Developers-Conference-GDC/15059336961?ref=ts
http://mygdc.gdconf.com/login/

I haven't signed up for the myGDC as of yet due to the efforts trying to find interesting articles or write some of my fresh articles for you all. I've also been promoting on various sites trying to pull in some more people to submit articles to the editor.

Gamasutra.com has provided some of the best GDC coverage and has a live coverage site that keeps alot of the interesting headlines available. The top five i'm looking at now (by date) include the announcment of what hopes to be the 4th console giant. This console is called Zeebo and is inteded for the BRIC market. More here...

The next four include a keynote from Ron Carmel about his success as and indie dev. There is coverage about Sony offering updated dev kits. Havok has announced its AI Middleware SDK and Habbo's Haro talks marrying social worlds with game mechanics. These are only a handful of the articles that are offered on gamasutra from the GDC 2009 and I believe so far I've seen an article for everyone. Maybe next year GCZ will be able to send a wo/man into the GDC 2010 for our own coverage.

We will try to keep a top 5 article posting from the gamasutra site but I would definatley reccommend keeping up with GDC for the potential leaked info about our hardware future. If you would like to follow the GDC from the official site follow this link.

Article Highlights

Gamasutra has an article on giving your AI some intellegent stupidity. This will be the first of many article highlights you can expect to see at GCZine and will be presented in this manner.

Follow thelink
http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php?story=3947

Opening Day

Hello and welcome to a newborn creation on the web. I am an indie game developer who is a member of over a dozen communities. The problems I've faced typically are small communities that flourish for a short while then die spontaneously and large ones that refuse to acknowledge your existence or knowledge so they tend to grow slowly. I think the largest failure to the world of indie dev lies in two issues honestly.... FORUMS are one. Too much free time is needed for a forum, and tend to get of topic quickly. I am using a blog to remove this issue from getting the needed information for developers noticed. We'll call it forcing a focal point to prevent the "Oh look... Shinies..." syndrome of the hobby game maker. The second issue is the knowledge is too spread out and there isn't a central point. This site might reference that one that references this one over here, but now i've wasted 20 minutes of design and development time trying to find a small article with a code snippet I wanted an hour ago!

My intention with GCZine is to centralize as much information and knowledge as possible as per articles. I will be attempting to post a single article each week (aiming for Sunday Evenings) to spark up some light commentary and maybe inform some of you about something new. In the meantime blogger will not hold GCZine forever and I will be working on a blg/forum/news site in the background in all custom code. I think the ideal way to present this will be a Myspace meets Washington Post type of site where its in your face with valuable news but profiles that allow you to keep track of your favorites and people you like. To help pull some of the bantering to a private forumesq chat behind the scenes that won't clutter the news pages. I will remove irrelevant comments to articles.

I hope I can pull in people and will be trying to pull from OnGameDev, GameDev, and Gamasutra at early stages to contribute commentary and hopefully article writers to try and published more articles. I am a programmer and will focus alot more on programming than an artist would obviously. So long and short I am in search of audio and graphics people as researchers/writers. I believe everyone is a designer and that can be easily contributed to. I have setup a gmail account for the site as gczine@gmail.com and will be adding this name to my IM software to allow myself to receive messages from fans/visitors/members whatever you choose to call yourselves. If you have any suggestions or wishlist articles or just want to tell me that a specific article sucked and how it can be improved I will gladly take them all. Don't be a rude "flamer" and try to provide constructive feedback for me/us so that we may improve and shape.

Another sidelong goal to throw in to this site is a linker between developers and gamers. I will be considering placing a secondary page within GCZine that is games news, updates, and reviews. I hope this will attract non-developers to our scene and they will be able to setup a more minimal gamer profile versus the developer profile. This could allow a Game Tester resume to be setup to allow developers to search for potential testers and even allow gamers to follow all those indie dev games they don't know about. I will be hoping to hook in some "sponsors" if you will to help us grow. I will be providing some news feedback on IGF and GCA and will be providing direct links to the IGDA website.

If you have graced us before our first official article I hope you will return many times again and become a flagship member and a long time veteran.