Hey pals!

When we launched this version of GW our intention was to sort of shut the whining down because there was way too much inane discussion about GW that lead absolutely nowhere. Meanwhile the plan was to kind of semi-develop new add-on services that we were going to add to the mainsite (see the top bar on the mainpage) but hey, look where we are now. Still the same place. Last November I temporarily lost my job over a contract disagreement and ASE got busy(ier) with school, so everything pretty much came to a halt when we had to sort out our real lives.

ANYWAY.

I still love GW and Bart still loves GW and everyone else still claim they love GW, so while we've all been happy and apathetic about GW's future for a good while now I have SECRETLY BEEN WORKING on a site that we are hoping to replace GW in the near future. We've made a few topics and statements about it here and there but nothing concrete, so here comes an official "new GW"-topic that you've only seen a handful of times before. I'll give you all a brief explanation of what it's going to be, and then you can all give input and come up with your cool suggestions. No need to mention an RPG arena-system, because we're already hard at work on that...

SO.

First things first, it's not going to be called GW. Or maybe it will, we haven't decided on a name yet. Could be GW. Could be Astrojone. Could be RPG Cove. We don't know! The plan however is to launch the site on a completely new server under a completely different name so we can put an end to the current state of GW once and for all, because quite frankly, the community is hella old. Like right now we're the internet equivalent of a crumbling old soviet building that could fall apart at any moment. In fact, it partly has already!

Second, you're obviously wondering what the site is going to look like and how it's going to function. Well too bad! Top secret information. Actually, I haven't finished the layout yet, but I'm working on it as I code. The concepts are looking really sweet, and I'm going to post some piccies as soon as I have something presentable. As for the functionality, it's basically going to carry on the concept consensus from way back when Mateui was still admin and we had a two-year development process that never got us anywhere. The site is going to be organized like this:

News
 - This issue
 - Last issue
 - Archive
 - Reader picks
 - Podcast
Games
 - Catalog
 - Competition winners
Development
 - Tutorials
 - Devlogs
Community
 - Forums
 - IRC
 - Webradio/TV?
 - Wiki? (in the case that someone would like to chronicle old GW characters and productions)
Info
 - Mission statement, advertising info etc.

I am guessing your first question will be WHAT THE FRICK IS UP WITH THE NEWS SECTION? And well, the answer is that the news on GW have always been boring as heck. Whoever read UPDATE FRIDAYS or whatever they were called back on GW3 except for the staff? Nobody. So, what we're going to do instead is kind of a semi-meta-updated newspaper or magazine-like section that displays all the latest news, games, development resources and most importantly FORUM TOPICS on a weekly basis, meaning that the front page will start next to completely blank on Mondays and gradually build up over the course of the week, and "Last issue" is going to show the complete issue from last week. Archive is self-explanatory, and so are the rest of the sections I guess!

For the Podcast I am hoping that a kind and funny soul will be able to frequently make inane selectbutton-esque podcast entries to be added on the mainsite. As it looks now, Jamie/jamicus is up for hosting some kind of frequent collaboration podcast, so I'm hoping this will work out. Otherwise we'll have to have some boring-ass Rm2k guy read tutorials out loud which has been 99% of GW's content since Bart first put it together back in 2001 which in turn makes you wonder how the heck GW managed to survive this long in the first place!

Anyway, so what's the point of this topic? Well, I'd like to hear your questions and ideas so far. If you want to rant and rave then go ahead I guess, but I don't want to turn this into another WHAT GW NEEDS topic. Do feel free to say whatever the heck you want though, because in the end it's only going to help us develop the best possible site we can!

It's cool that you took the time to post that Ryan.

GW still has about 10-50 active users (logged in) at any given time. Guess we should just let it die instead of turning it into something productive.

stuff

Well, the incentive behind the creation of this new version is that there is a popular game engine in production that so far only has an application development side to its community, and as it is gaining a lot of ground and has been for a good while it is going to need a game design-oriented side as well, and this is the spot we are hoping to fill - kind of like how GW was one of the few Rm2k outlets back in the day.

I've been chatting with the developers and userbase, and while the response has been half positive half indifferent, I've seen a lot of interest from them in this idea, and we're hoping that they'll be even more persuaded once we see through this website. In addition to that we're going to support a line of next generation platform independent game development engines and toolkits that I guess you could consider standard for the current indie developers, which will hopefully land us more development-oriented members.

Also, we're going to work with a few popular game development sites that will hopefully advertise us once we're up and running, and I'm hoping to see some more of this too.