GMking.org Blog

GameMaker Blog first suggested a possible merge between GMpedia and The YoYo Games Wiki when several GMpedia SysOps were spotted on the SysOp list of the YoYo Games wiki. GameMaker Blog also noted that some changes occurring in the YoYo Games wiki are very possibly related to such GMpedia-YoYo Games wiki merge.

Enough speculation. I guess everyone’s just waiting for a final and official word, so here I go…

For the better good of the community, and keeping in the same pace of GMking.org of wanting to provide comprehensive and centralized resources for game developers, GMpedia.org, a game development (and particularly Game Maker) wiki, will soon be merging with the YoYo Games wiki.

While when we originally approached YoYo Games, we approached them for simple inter-wiki cooperation, they seemed to be excited about a bigger move; a complete content merge between the two wikis. Considering the nature of GMking.org, we were hesitant and indeed rejected the initial offer (multiple times), but eventually chose to reconsider and instead asked YoYo Games do address some of our concerns before we go on with anything. Indeed, we gave YYG a list of our concerns and “conditions” and they have agreed to them, seeing them as fair, and thus we are moving forward with a merge.

GMking asked for removal of advertisements from the wiki section of YoYo Games. We wanted to do this because we felt more motivated and comfortable contributing and assisting in a fully community orientated website. While we have no problem with YoYo Games making profit of course, we feel that this will more define the wiki as something that is related to the community itself. YoYo Games agreed with such demands.

We also asked for the wiki licensing to change to Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0, as to allow more open content to be shared, contributed, redistributed, and have others make derivatives of such work. For those who do not know, Creative Commons is an excellent open license, and GMking.org already uses it for most of its projects.

As part of the deal, we will eventually be looking at some direct or indirect method of “crediting” GMking.org for the contributions. This will be in the form of links on a “Contributors” page or “SysOps” page or even the main link. We’re not too strict about this so you’ll find out more as we go on.

All existing GMpeida Sysops have also been added as YYG Wiki sysops and will continue to actively contribute there.

GMpedia also requested that most non Game Maker content should remain in the new YoYo Games wiki. This includes things like Windows SDK articles, Visual c++ articles, etc. which we believe are also helpful to DLL developers for Game Maker. Articles about more direct competitors such as Flash articles and “The Game Creator” articles will be moved over to other open source wikis.

I’m looking forward to seeing your feedback on this.

Eyas

Hey everyone!

Sorry for keeping you waiting about MarkUp 15. While a lot of the work was done already on the issue, it had halted development for a while due to a shortage of variety of content (NOT quantity). We wanted an additional one tutorial and one more “The Making of…” article, which experienced long delays with their (non-staff) writers.

I decided to continue development regardless of the late content and ask others to provide replacement content if possible. I think it is unfair that a couple of articles should hold the issue any longer, because Issue 15 will a lot have excellent content already and that shouldn’t be held off.

Right now we have already released two internal drafts for the staff. Such drafts are usually lacking in a contents page, a title page, etc. and has some blank spaces and placeholders here and there. The staff is actively reviewing the draft.

If anyone is interested to know something specific about the development process of the upcoming issue of MarkUp Magazine and what’s going on with it, please drop a comment here!

For those of you aware of the Game Maker Knowledge Base, run by nickydude, we have made a dea with nickydude in which all content of GMKB will be moved over to GMpedia. Importing all Game Maker and Game Maker funciton content has been complete, as well as tutorial content. Currently we’re considering importing articles in the “Questions” category but that might take a while. According to the initial deal, GMKB would be eventaully redirecting to GMpedia, however due to yet undisclosed plans, you might see something else happen in the coming weeks.

As for now, GMpedia has 600 articles, the majority of which are Game Maker development articles, with tutorials, function descriptions, examples, and general information about Game Maker releases, etc.

Thanks for all of you whom have contirbuted to GMpedia.org, please keep those contributions coming!

I suppose being with a rather well known/liked entity such as GMTV I can expect to have people wanting to join the staff and get involved. That’s fine and dandy but, when joining someones staff you have to keep in mind that they have every right to reject you. Thus, bringing me to my latest case of discontent.

Recently a GMC user that I will just leave as anonymous sent me a friendly PM basically asking to join the GMTV staff. I did the usual procedure and just simply asked for an audition video so that we could decide if he was worth hiring or not. Give or take a few weeks later his audition showed up on my computer, to say the least it wasn’t very great. I didn’t want to directly tell him he wasn’t hired (he was so enthusiastic about it) so I was going to wait a few weeks and then tell him (I was busy myself) so after two weeks I get a message (via MSN) stating that if I don’t hire him he will start his own show (sounds like a threat, eh?).. long story short I tell him how he isn’t hired, he proceeds to tell me how my show sucksis bad and how his is going to be much better (funny considering he wanted to join).

During the next week I receive messages telling me his progress he has made and he even sent me his intro script, (imo: turns out he is completely copying gmtv even his script was almost identical, he has news and something that’s exactly like our face off). When I confront him of this he tells me about how im copying him and that his show are way better than mine (when there subtle changes between our shows).

He also informed me that his show will be released in three weeks (scary considering he is starting from scratch) he said unlike me he has experience and he knows what he is doing (aren’t I the one with 4 episodes?) so far he has shown me no proof that he can video edit, so I think we can assume he uses WMM. I suppose we can expect another show within a few weeks I can’t say it will be bad until I’ve seen it.

GMking.org’s Game Development wiki service, GMpedia.org, has finally reached its 600th article milestone! Our 600th article was the “temp_directory” article, which discusses the temp_directory global variable in Game Maker.

We’re really glad to having reached such article count, which indeed makes GMpedia.org one of the most comprehensive game development and Game Maker wikis out there (not simply taking into account an article count, but also the nature and length of the articles available).

GMpedia.org is a project of GMking.org, along with other publications such as MarkUp Magazine, GMTV, and the GMking.org audcast. The wiki format of GMpedia.org makes it a very open source of information, but its great and organized structure makes information more discoverable and makes it easier for contributors to know how to contribute exactly. The GMking.org staff is also very dedicated to GMpedia, so we check when new content is added by other contributors and make sure its up to par with our standards, as well as make sure it uses proper wiki formatting, naming conventions, style guidelines, templates, etc.

Anyways, congratulations GMpedia for the 600 articles. Soon they’ll be 1000 I’m sure.. lets start counting days till then !

Topics covered in this audcast:

Cage Match: 00:50

Loads of Game Maker mags: 02:18

G3D Effects library: 04:45

GMTV Merge with GMking: 06:26

Game of the Week: 7:27

Download: MP3 (low) / AAC / OGG

Subscribe to the audcast, and discuss this audcast by going to the GMking audcast microsite.

Image via Wikipedia

The GMking staff is extremely geographically diverse, which makes communication and decision making processes much harder.  Many of our staff have an 8 hour or more time gap (which probably explains why some of us are such night-owls ).

How do we all stay in touch?  Easy!

• Google Chat, we all love it, and you should too.  If you have a GMail account it’s that poor little-used widget on the left side of your mailbox.  It also lets you talk to your AIM and ICQ buddies, should you have any
• Yahoo Mail has a similar feature, but for YIM and MSN contacts, which you could probably use if your team mainly used those services instead of Jabber/AIM/ICQ.
• Meebo is the all in one online instant messenger.  It supports ICQ, AIM, Jabber (GTalk too), MSN and YIM.  I use this quite often since I have a lot of contacts spread over many different networks, and I don’t want to suck up 2GB of ram with a dozen different clients (no one mention trillion!).
• Email comes in handy too, for when we need to reach someone who isn’t online just then.
• Staff Forums keep us all moving in the same director toward the same goals.

Overall, we don’t use any fancy silver-bullet solutions for our communication needs, we just apply what we already have, and use it to furnish our team environment.

Related articles you might find interesting…

• Slick IM for Windows Mobile
• Google to Connect to Other IM Networks Using Jabber Transports
• Google Talk And Windows Live Messenger 9 Get Friendly

Active development of Issue 15 of MarkUp magazine has begun, so you can expect the new issue of MarkUp to be released somewhere between the end of this month and the first week of next month, hopefully earlier!

The layout has been finalized, and I’m happy to say its blue, so all of you who said they liked the style of the previous issue but wanted another color can now relax.Though the exact degree of blue might change a bit with the first couple of drafts, we’re confident we found the inner design of our choice for this issue, and we hope you’ll like it!

On the cover side, staff voting is going on to determine the cover we will use. The voting has been tight and we got a tie earlier, which caused us to do a revote with only the most two popular options, we’ll see how it goes!

We have got a lot of reviews and interviews packed for this issue too, expect to see games like Senseless War, Mubbly Tower, Angels, Silent Dawn reviewed in the next issue, as well as the authors of some of these games interivewed.

The Cities at War and World in War development journals are complete. For this issue, the journals will be a bit “ligher”, since they are introductory, talking about the background of the project, planned features, etc. Expect to see more technical and engaging content so on.

Our ‘The Making of…’ article will address the making of “Visit”. Other content includes Drag and Drop to GML conversion, storyline writing and character design, and much more. If you still have suggestions on articles to include for this issue of MarkUp, make sure to contact the staff at the MarkUp 15 topic on the GMking.org forums.

Through the years at GMking & co, we’ve actively worked in an open source style team environment.  In fact, it’s one of the main things we attribute our success!  Over time we’ve found some things that keep our team spirit and creative juices flowing.  Today, I’m going to share some of those with you, and dissect the planning of a GMking project.

Keeping the Team Happy

In order to keep our teams happy and motivated, we make sure we have goals to work toward, and a guideposts along the way so everyone can see the progress being made.  In MarkUp, the goals is easy: To Release the Next Issue, and Make it Better Than Ever!.  The guideposts are typically, finishing a number of articles, then a series of drafts, finally the “release candidate”, and the release.  For some of our other projects, this is more difficult to define, but goals are always in place.

Public Discussion

We do all the decision making we can in public with our teams, even administrative decisions, because involvement is important.  If we made many important decisions totally in private, we would have issues gaining additional volunteers to join our teams.  Why?  No serious contribute will stick around long if all the decisions are made by secret council.  Giving everyone the opportunity to have their say is important.

Case in Point: MarkUp 14’s Cover

Discussion on MarkUp 14's Cover

Development of Issue 15 is well underway. I won’t be giving a lot of details, because that would just rob the excitement out of the issue itself when it comes out. However, here are some things that might interest you:

A New Logo

We’ve been working for a while on a new logo, and thanks to Suhaib, our graphics designer, we finally have the logo of our choice. The logo pretty much says what ‘MarkUp’ really is - in our point of view at least! The logo will be revealed in Issue 15 of the Magazine.

Cover & Design

From a graphics standpoint, we’re also working on the new cover and inner design for the magazine. This month’s design will be much darker with some blue in it. I realize we said that Issue 15’s design should be predominantly blue, but I think you’ll like the dark heading design as well. The inner layout will also recieve some minor tweaks here and there.

Development Journals Back!

‘Cities at War’, developed by XSoft Games and headed by Robert-Jan Bruintjes has resumed development, so we will be seing its development journals reappear in the magazine. We’ve also got a new game that will have Development Journals in the magazine: World in War. We hope you enjoy the development journals!

‘The Making of…’ Articles

We’re contacting some creators to write ‘The Making of…’ articles for their games, and should have a few of those in the next issue. If you have a particular game that you like and want to ask us to get a ‘The Making of…’ article written about it, e-mail us at staff@gmking.org and tell us the game!

Games and Puzzles… in MarkUp?!

Games and puzzles never say ’serious development’ or ‘technical’, and we realize that. But we’re pretty excited about introducing new technical and serious MarkUp-esque games and puzzles in the next issue. Wait for issue 15 and tell us what you think!

Of course, as always, we have a lot of great tutorials, scripts, reviews, and interviews in store; as well us general development editorials and opinion articles. Stay tuned!