GMWeekly’s Game Maker… Dudes! comic returns. But seriously – 8 pages for a monthly magazine? Not off to a good start. Your opinions?

PS. Thanks for the non-transparent PNG logo!

GMWeekly returns as “Kwiklook Magazine” is taken from: GameMaker Blog

GMWeekly have today released their 15th issue (download) which means they have now produced as many issues as MarkUp and more issues than any other Game Maker magazine.

Earlier this week I spoke to the creator of the magazine, Darren Poole, and asked him about the idea behind GMWeekly and got his thoughts on the magazine’s future.

Why did you decide to launch GMWeekly?
Well, I sort of felt that there was a gap in the ‘market’ if you like. I thought about what other GameMaker magazines lacked – consistency (in releasing issues). I thought I’d overcome this problem by releasing a relatively short GameMaker magazine and making sure that I never get a gigantic team working on it. Also, I was failry bored when I started it up and I wanted something that would keep me busy throughout each week.

You decided to focus more on news than the other features included in the already established magazines – is this something you thought was missing from the community?
Well yes, although of course there are a couple of GameMaker news blogs that I’m aware of. I thought it would make a change to the norm by making the magazine not so similar to exisiting ones. Another reason is because I find news easy to report on, in comparison to writing technical articles and tutorials about GameMaker.

Did you really think that you would still be producing at 15 issues, considering the vast majority of Game Maker magazines produce only very few issues?
Well I planned to keep it going for as long as I feasibly could. I thought that if I could get a decent backing from the GMC I would be able to keep going to until the end of the year at least. I wasn’t sure if people would like the publication and I was somewhat surprised at the fact that quite a few praised if after Issue #1 – it was a pretty poor issue and I should have put more effort into it. I didn’t really think about the record of other GameMaker magazines. Just because they may have failed, that didn’t mean I was going to.

Where do you see GMWeekly in 3 months time?
Hopefully the publication should be still around. Maybe people will become bored of it, but we’ll just have to see. I’m becoming increasingly busy now, with GCSE tests looming and A-levels on the horizon. Though I still think that my determination will carry the magazine forward. Crikey – in three months, I would be releasing Issue #27 or there abouts!

GMWeekly releases 15th issue is taken from: GameMaker Blog

“First of all, I should apologise for the absence of an issue last week. Both me and Broxter were extremely busy and it became obvious to us that we would just not be able to get an issue out. We’re sorry if we disappointed anybody, but we hope to get right back on track. Because of this, we now have a new release policy: the publication will be released on most Fridays. So, this means that some weeks (probably about one in six or seven) there will be no issue. Hopefully you agree with and understand this.
There wasn’t much news around GM last week anyway, to be honest,…”
- Darren Poole, GMWeekly 13

Changing release schedules is certainly nothing new when it comes to GameMaker magazines, but GMWeekly did manage to stick to their original release dates better than any other magazine has done so previously – something that they should be proud of.

GM-Most-Weekly is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Whilst it may widely be considered that releasing a second issue is the biggest hurdle when producing a Game Maker magazine, even successful magazines such as GMTech and MarkUp took 2 months to release their second issue, GMWeekly proved many of its critics wrong by realising 12-weekly issues to (or close to) schedule.

The magazine is different from more traditional Game Maker periodicals as its primary focus is on community news with little focus given to game development advice, although game reviews are now included.

Although I am not superstitious you may care to know that the thirteenth issue of MarkUp was the first of that publication to be released late after a string of 11 back-to-back monthly issues following the pilot edition.

Actual figures are higher as files are mirrored at a different host

GMWeekly or not so is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Obviously it should be noted that the magazines all have different release schedules, so we would not expect them each to release a certain number of issues per month. Russell’s Quaterly, for example, is actually ahead of schedule whilst GMWeekly are sticking to their promise of one issue per week.

From what I can see there appears to be a pattern in the release dates of magazines in their first few months. GMTech, MarkUp and Scope all took at least a months break after their first issue was released, then managed to produce several months of back-to-back releases (MarkUp released issues in 11 consecutive months!), before slipping to less regular releases.

Exceeding the expectations of some GMWeekly has managed to stick to its schedule of releasing every Friday before today.  Prior to the release today it has received around 85 downloads from its primary host per issue. The short issue length and limited degree of coverage (of GameMaker news which can be found elsewhere) may contribute to these relatively low download figures – however the magazine hasn’t even been around for 2 months yet, so given more time I expect recognition of the magazine to increase.

What are your thoughts on the regularity of magazine releases? Does it even matter?

GMWeekly and Magazine Stats is taken from: GameMaker Blog

A funny and topical GameMaker themed comic – hurrah!

Taken from GM Weekly #3

A funny GM comic is taken from: GameMaker Blog

As well as community news the short newsletter style publication also features a review of puzzle game Elimod + Dagros.

Download GMWeekly issue 2 (left click).

GMWeekly issue 2 is taken from: GameMaker Blog