Yeah, no shit.
http://www.gamingw.netGW6 is done. I imagine most people probably stopped believing the "GW6 is coming..." spiel a long time ago (and for good reason, since that was mostly bullshit designed to build up FALSE HOPE), but yeah, it's finished. I'm going to go ahead and say that you should probably put all expectations based on what you've heard or what you've seen in old screenshots out of your mind, because this is not related to any of those older projects in any way. This version of GW6 was based entirely around an idea I put together around the time I became admin after realizing that the site would never be made if we kept trying to go about it in the same way. It's a pretty substantially different direction in some ways than the old ideas and the older versions of GW. I came up with a concept that I felt would be realistic but also help take the site in the direction we wanted, so some of the BELLS//WHISTLES have been cut where we felt they weren't important or relevant to what we were going for.
It's been in development since sometime in November, so it was around six weeks from conception to completion. As far as who developed it, primarily you have GZ to thank. He coded the entire website itself, and did not take four years to do it. Really, he has been a workhorse about things and this would never have gotten done had he not stepped up. The layout was done by GR and modified by konix, who also did the banner. Mostly though, it was GZ and I working together over the weeks to put my idea into action and figuring out what we wanted the site to be, working out the kinks, and so on. Part of the reason the development process went so quickly was because 95% of the time it was the two of us making decisions and talking about what needed to be done, and not a dozen people needing to confer with one another. It went through a couple weeks of beta within the mod and staff forums, and we took care of a lot of the issues that people seemed to have problems with then, so hopefully this version will be something most people can be happy with.
To give you a brief rundown of the site itself, it's basically broken down into four sections, plus the search and submit pages.
News is the main page, and it'll display the featured game development articles, community articles, tutorials, games/reviews, as well as a tracker for recent submissions to all categories. There might also be somewhere for news/updates in the general sense, but this would be a feature that came later.
Resources is where the game development content goes. We don't have anything stupid like RM2K CHIPSETS so this is mostly going to be game dev articles and tutorials. In the future, we might integrate hosting of graphic/musical resources that would be exclusive or almost exclusive to GW, but this is still in the conception phase and, again, would be a change that would come later on. It's definitely a possibility, though, and really is just a matter of whether we can muster the resources and means to accomplish this.
Games is where the games and reviews are held. It's a bit different from some other game databases because I did not want to flood it with shitty games, so made it a stipulation early on that we would only have this if it only held pretty good games. Also, each game comes with a review to give you an idea of its quality, issues, and so on. It's for both of these reasons that it's started off small, but we've got a few people who review games, so I expect it to grow fairly quickly. I would rather have a database of 50-100 good indie games than one that has 500, 90% of which are completely terrible, so this was kind of the thought process behind having a smaller one with reviews and quality control. We just wanted it to be a place where people could go to reliably get good amateur games.
Community is a catchall section for everything that doesn't relate to game development. It's broken up into three categories: video games, music, and general. The first two are fairly obvious, and the third one is yet another catchall for general articles about humor (Steel's college series, for example), movies, and basically anything that does not relate to game development, video games, or music.
Search is a pretty straightforward search feature. From my experience with it, it works very well. It doesn't support quotes or +/- yet, but this is a feature we're working on integrating.
Submit is how you go about submitting content. Although we have staffers, anyone can review a game or write an article, and submit it through this page. From there, it goes to a holding area where it needs to be approved by an admin or community editor before being posted to the mainsite.
We've moved many of the older articles onto the new mainsite, and from now on this is where all new articles will be posted. If you can't find an older article on the main site, it's because it's been left in the blog subforums, which are going to be archived soon. I still need to transfer some of the more recent (posted within the last five days) blog articles into the mainsite, though, so keep an eye out for those, too.
So yeah, I think it's a pretty straightforward concept. Make no mistake, this site is not completely done in terms of development. It's finished and it's live, but we're going to continue working on it and adding features that we think it needs but did not deem important enough to be necessary for the initial launch. I'd like to reiterate that the concept was based around a realistic expectation of what was possible, even with a guy as productive as GZ, and took six weeks to make with the majority of the work being done by two people (ONE, actually). If you have comments or criticisms, feel free to voice them, but keep the fact that it is a work in progress and that we will be making some changes and adding things on as we go in mind. If you have any serious issues or suggestions pertaining to the mainsite, contact me (not GZ, this will annoy him greatly) via PM and I will consider what you have to say, relay it to GZ or another coder, and get back to you on how we can fix the issue, if we can even fix it to begin with, and whether or not we can integrate your suggestion into the site.
Alright, that's all I've got. GO NUTS.
Gaming World Forums
GW6 is Live