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.