Holy wow what a long day. I was up at 9am to catch a train into NYC for a meeting with NBC executives and fellow local game developers to discuss an upcoming conference in Philly this October. Super stoked about being involved with that and look forward to getting GDNet more involved. Then this evening I was up in Hoboken, NJ to attend my local IGDA chapter meeting and connected with some new people as well as catching up with friends prior to the craziness that is GDC next week. Holy crap really? Next week?!
Moderator Report Report
So last week I mentioned how I was checking up on all the moderators that we currently have scurrying about the forums. Well I did, all 73 of them. A handful were Staff and Moderator Emeritus members (which is our fancy title for past-serving mods) but around 60 are forum mods/roving mods. And you wonder why you all can't get away with anything around here, much to the dismay of many people.
The report has highlighted several issues we need to resolve regarding forum moderators who aren't checking in often or at all anymore, roving mods assigned to forums that aren't labeled properly, roving mods that aren't coming around at all anymore, etc. A couple roving mods have daily site checking habits, and that'll be nice for making them forum mods to replace those that aren't able to around much anymore. I mean, obviously the roving mods still catch people in those forums but it's important to have an active visible contact for that forum.
We'll be looking at this data over the next week at GDC. In the meantime it's quite colorful so makes for a good picture to spruce up this entry:
The GDNet Collection is Complete
Speaking of images:
The fourth book, Advanced Game Programming was released on the 17th, completing the series. It was a great time making these books happen, and as promised I will tell the full story now that they are all out on the shelves. I had expected them to be out earlier, so with GDC next week I won't have time to write everything up until sometime in April. I will try to get an outline completed though on the trip there or back.
John took the idea from another book to leave a blank space in the Advanced Programming book's Dedication for you to fill in the name of whomever you want. Seeing as my mother's first reaction to opening up Business and Production (the first book released) was "What?!? It's not dedicated to ME??" I of course dedicated it to her :P
So now she's happy. She came into my room to pet "her book" goodnight before going to bed the other day [lol]. She wanted to keep it on her shelf but it was the first copy of the book I received from the publisher so I wanted it on my shelf. Luckily I have two more coming so I'll just dedicate her another one and she can keep that one :P
Oh I also successfully managed to make an audio excerpt out of Mark "Prinz Eugn" Simpson's beginning pixel article from the Design and Content book. It ran a whopping 10 mins and really gives some meaty info - of course it's way better with the figures and walk-through of techniques in the book. But it'll at least give aspiring pixel artists something to start with.
I was hoping to record another audio piece before I left for GDC but there's just no time.
Visit Us at GDC!
If you're heading out to GDC this year, don't forget to swing by the booth sometime to say Hi! I think we're in booth #6522 - it's kinda messed up because we had planned to be right across the way from our pals Course PTR and then we got shoved out. Apparently they ran out of room and needed to convert what was originally three separate booth stalls into a single stall for one company. So at least we weren't the only ones who got booted to some other spot on the floor. Bah. Cheer us up by stopping by to chat.
New Resources
- Enterprise Architect - Stefan reviews Sparx Systems' Enterprise-class UML modeling and code generation tool.
New Events
- 3D Stimulus Day @ Newton, MA, United States - April 4, 2009
- ChinaJoy China Game Developers Conference @ Shanghai, China - July 24, 2009 to July 26, 2009
- Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Int'l Conference @ London, United Kingdom - September 1, 2009 to September 4, 2009
