Greetings fellow GDnet community members. It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the brand new version of The GameDev.net website, something that has been in development in one form or another for the past five years. Yea, five years. Besides the challenge of hitting a moving target in terms of keeping pace with changing technology, our internal team has also had to overcome various obstacles in planning and design.

Over the past three years we've also been able to witness and follow the re-launch of other game development websites like Gamasutra, GarageGames, and the IGDA. This has given us a chance to see site revamping in action and has helped to guide us in our redesign and relaunch of GameDev.net.

There are two big things about this new site that I would like to point out. The first is that this is not exactly what we originally dubbed "V5" a few years ago when we started talking more publicly about the site redesign. This is indeed the fifth generation of GameDev.net (some would argue it's the second) but it does not follow the full design spec that was originally laid out for V5. So if you were waiting for something you heard was coming with this new site launch and don't see it, that could be why.

This leads into my second item, which is that you are not looking at a fully-completed website. So yes, that V5 feature you were hoping to see might still be coming as we continue to roll out areas of the website. We decided on this less-rigid launch to give you all a chance to help mold and shape the final appearance that will hopefully last us another ten years.

You can do this by making gratuitous use of the "Feedback" tab you will see hovering to the left of every page. This will submit a ticket straight into our internal tracking system and will allow us to take care of bugs and issues as well as determine where to focus on site development. Don't just sit back and let us decide what you want in the new GDnet, tell us what you want!

I'm so happy and excited to finally be writing this blog post, made even cooler by the fact that I'm doing it from the road on my iPhone (Feedback: mobile site version still needs work ). There are exciting times ahead but looking back we wouldn't be at this point right now first and foremost without the support and generosity of our community (that's you!) and of course the hard work put into developing this site by the GDNet staff and mods.

To close, I would like to extend a special thank you to one of the original site founders Mike Tanczos for spearheading the development of this new website based on IPS. He shouldered a gargantuan amount of work over the last year to get the site to where it is today, a state we deem ready for your consumption. Thanks, Mike!

Enough babble from me, you all have some exploring to do! We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the new GameDev.net

UPDATE: While we will be jumping straight on fixing any serious bugs and issues that crop up as people start poking around and discovering things, we won't be commenting much specifically on general feedback and issues users are posting about. Tuesday morning I will have a new entry that covers a whole slew of topics that have been brought up so far that will help answer questions and ease minds... mostly