New Development Community

[mcory1]

I'm starting up a new developer community, and I thought I'd post a link to it here. I'm working on a small series of articles for basic game development to put up there, and other than the first installment there's no content, and only one post in the forums. The link is http://bluestardev.com/devcom. There's one post in one of the music forums, and that's it. I'd love any help anyone can give--I just started it up this weekend, so it's still pretty much a blank slate.

I'm wanting to try and make it more than just a developer community--that's about the only thing I can really offer at this time myself though--so if you aren't wanting to do anything with code, go ahead and check it out anyways and see if you have anything you'd like to post.

I really hope I'm not stepping on any toes by posting this; I'm mainly looking for feedback, hopefully some minor contributions--I really doubt this will be stealing anything away from this forum in the slightest. Even if someone could just make a few suggestions or comments about the site, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

[Firlefanz]

Hi!

Looks very good. :D

The problem is you get one like this each week right now, on Gamedev.net in the forums there a dozen pages like yours, sorry.

Firle

[mcory1]

Thanks!

I kinda figured this wouldn't exactly be something new around here :) I really couldn't think of anywhere else I could try and get it noticed though--everything I've seen with search engines is a waste of time unless you fork over some decent money. I appreciate the post though.

[WILL]

Don't even waste your money on that. :) It won't do you any good anyways. Google doesn't really work that way either.

I can appreciate you wanting to start up your own site, however consider your audience and the amount of interested people within that 'market'. If there is little interest or that kind of venture is heavily saturated, you'll most likely have a lot of 'dead air' about your site. If that fact doesn't sway you then, rock on! ;) Give'er and have fun with it at least.

Best of luck!

[mcory1]

Thanks for the perspective Will. I really don't have a specific target audience. Software development is about all I can contribute to for right now, and I think there's a small handful of other development websites out there ;)

'Dead Air' doesn't bother me too much; I really don't expect this thing to really take off. If I get 100 registered members someday I'll be happy, and if it gets to the point where I actually need to check in once a week to review a submission I'll be ecstatic.

Thanks again for the comments, I really appreciate them.

[Firlefanz]

Hi mcory1,

I saw you have a Review section. Is the review section for Developer games, projects etc?

Firle

[mcory1]

Hi Firle,
The site's still a blank slate. Anything anyone wants to review games--indy or mainstream--music, movies, books, furniture, websites, silverware, anything at all.

[Firlefanz]

I understand. I just thought if we can send something to you (own projects, games etc) and you would review it.

Firle

[WILL]

mcory, if you really want to work on a website, why not help out here instead? We have a growing community and it would allow all your material to be seen by a lot more people.

Plus we ourselves are looking for tallented writers and motivated individuals with your kind of energy. Do you program using Pascal? Or do you have much knowlage of game development or even things such as story writting, marketing and/or team and project management?

[Firlefanz]

For both sites (in case mcory1 does not want to join here) I think an Image of the day section would be nice (I think we had that topic here before). And I don't understand why there is no review section, most members write their hobby games (or engines) so it would be very nice to have a review area where selected members test other members projects. Just some thoughts :D

Firle

[WILL]

All I have to say is that 'good things are in the works'. ;)

[mcory1]

Firle, I can't gaurantee that I'd be able to give you a review or anything, but I'd be glad to post a link or two. If I'm able to get time to look over something, I have no problems reviewing anything.

Will, I appreciate the offer/suggestion, and I would like to take an active role where ever I can. I'm "fluent" in Pascal--the first real development environment I ever used was Delphi 4 (not counting little "Hello World" apps in C). As far as game development goes, I have a lot of book smarts but no real practice. I wrote a tic-tac-toe game once that actually determined when someone would win, and that's about it :) Most of my development work has been on the boring side of the fence--I haven't even really gotten to the point of being considered a hobbyist game developer.

Unfortunately I've gotten away from Delphi until just the past couple of months, and I'm not exactly back in tune with it. I'd gladly offer the tutorial series I'm working on for my site, but it's nowhere near finished, and it's in C--I don't know exactly how well that would fit in here.

The main reason I'm trying to get my own site off the ground though is because it seems that most of the community websites I've been to are after their own "niche" market; I'm wanting to do something more general-purpose, and not even focus just on development either. That's probably because I have quite a short attention span myself (hence the lack of game dev experience)--I like to bounce around from topic to topic.

I'd like to see a place where someone can read an article on developing a game with Managed DirectX in C#, discuss the pros and cons of using Postgres vs. MySQL with Java, maybe find some new music, and see if the movie they're going to go to on Friday night is any good. I know that's quite an ambitious order, but I figure it's worth a shot at least.

I'll gladly help where I can, but I don't think I'm really experienced enough with Pascal specifically or game development in general to be of too much use around here.

[WILL]

Unfortunately I've gotten away from Delphi until just the past couple of months, and I'm not exactly back in tune with it. I'd gladly offer the tutorial series I'm working on for my site, but it's nowhere near finished, and it's in C--I don't know exactly how well that would fit in here.

Well thats easy, just rewrite the source to Object Pascal and your set. :) Yeah, I'm serious. :lol: Most of what theory that is written for C and C++ programmers holds perfectly true for the Pascal or Object Pascal programmer too. In fact it may even be easier to read and understand.

One thing that urks most Pascal-minded programmers though, is the lack of Pasca code in tutorials. Remember when Snowman(I think this was his name) translated Denthor's VGA and Demoscene tutorials? Just took the C and made it Pascal... and thats all that was needed to understand the concepts AND the source.


Sounds to me like you want a site to air your own thoughts and ideas. Maybe then make it more personal than a smogasbord-kind of 'community'. Like a Journal with a blog and all of your self written articles and personal projects. Have you been to Traveler's site? He did a great job and it's fun to read through his articles and see how he did certan projects.

[mcory1]

Well thats easy, just rewrite the source to Object Pascal and your set. :) Yeah, I'm serious. :lol: Most of what theory that is written for C and C++ programmers holds perfectly true for the Pascal or Object Pascal programmer too. In fact it may even be easier to read and understand.


I might do that. I need to wait until I'm finished, or at least a little further along though--I'm still undecided if I want to walk through making a game or go through making a library (boils down to the same footwork, just taking a different path, for what I have in mind at least). The main reason I'm doing it in C right now though is because that's actually a bit easier to wrap my brain around as far as laying it out. Really strange, because the langauge I'm most comfortable with at the moment is C#.



One thing that urks most Pascal-minded programmers though, is the lack of Pasca code in tutorials. Remember when Snowman(I think this was his name) translated Denthor's VGA and Demoscene tutorials? Just took the C and made it Pascal... and thats all that was needed to understand the concepts AND the source.


I understand completely. In fact, that was one of the reasons I kinda got out of Delphi--very little support compared to other languages, very little open source code other than a few projects (ie JEDI). It seemed that if you weren't doing a large-scale enterprise database system, you didn't really matter. Even then, you only mattered if you could fork out a couple hundred for a component library.



Sounds to me like you want a site to air your own thoughts and ideas. Maybe then make it more personal than a smogasbord-kind of 'community'. Like a Journal with a blog and all of your self written articles and personal projects. Have you been to Traveler's site? He did a great job and it's fun to read through his articles and see how he did certan projects.

In a way you're correct; I do want a place to bounce my own ideas off of. The main reason I don't want to push this as my own blog/journal/publishing site though is because there's already too many of them, and I--on my own--don't really have enough to offer in line of articles to keep people's interest. I may be able to pull off a few tuts or a tip sheet here or there, but the world doesn't need another blog and I'm not enough of a writer to have an editorial site devoted to myself--I can't produce varied enough content fast enough, and I can only offer my own perspective.

Granted, there's more than a fair amount of community sites as well, but as I said before they all seem too focused on a single audience. The way I look at it, let's say this thing actually has a member base of some fair size, and it's got decently varied content. Someone goes and checks out the music section of the forum, they see an intro to Pascal development (to keep mildly on topic :)) They've never heard of a compiler in their life, but it catches their eye, they're hooked, and there's another Delphi guru in the making.

If I'd just made it centered on a single topic, they never would've come by, or they never would've found anything different than what they were looking for. If I'd just made it my own personal blog, they probably wouldn't have stopped at mine amidst the thousands of entries at MySpace, BlogSpot, MSN Spaces, so on and so forth. By making it a "smorgasboard" (good analogy, btw) instead of a precision-strike, it gives others a place to get their ideas out about whatever topic they enjoy, without limiting it just to development. It increases the potential audience past that of any developers who may find it useful to pretty much anyone who wants to write/read about something. More eyes allow for more ideas--even if the person reading never read a line of code in their life, they may have some insight you over looked.

Okay, I think I'm done for now :) Sorry about the longwindedness--not much of a writer, but I don't let it stop me.