The 14th issue of the MarkUp game development magazine has been released. At 54 pages in length it is over twice as long as April’s issue 13 and also sports a brand new red colour scheme.
Download MarkUp 14:
- High Quality pdf
- Low Quality pdf
Inside:
- Exclusive 6-page preview of the full version of 65M +1 BC
- “Viscerality” (how to suck people into games)
- Making lists with local arrays
- Expanding GameMaker with .NET
- A bumper “The Making of….”, this issues game is 9 pages of Falling Troy
- Plus of course regular features such as script and extension of the month, MarDar, game reviews and interviews
finally the good gossip, meanwhile I am currently reading the Issue number 14 of Mark Up, wow and I am page 5 already, and just wow it really amazes me, and impresses me, thank heavens for this glorious issue of Mark Up.
I enjoyed this issue, and found the article about Falling Troy in particular to be very informative.
Thanks for the plug; game design is pretty much the focus of my magazine, as you rightly state, though I don’t know if I’d consider my pieces to necessarily be “editorials”. I will grok that I don’t provide the sort of highly technical information that Mark Up provides.
And I think shisn’t is my new favourite word– whatever it means.
I disagree; all the images in the articles I read (granted, I did not read every article and I can not vouch for my article) seemed to enhance the quality of the article containing the image and clarify the meaning of the article.
Great issue in my opinion, I thought it looked great and had a lot of useful content.
I have made no references to Phil’s blog posts here, I am just using information posted by you and that is in the actual issue. Just to clear that up.
I don’t think any of your articles are ‘useless’ – I wouldn’t ever say that. I just believe that some of them are really long, when there are some things that can be rounded up in a shorter, and nicer way.
I know exclusive previews are meant to have a lot of screens and other information with it – that is pretty clear to know. Having an image to illustrate each point like a tutorial makes the issue look more spread out, this isn’t the only time – however you asked for one example, and that is what I mentioned.
I have looked through the whole issue, you asked for an example where I thought that a screenshot was ‘out of place, added to make the issue longer’. You asked for one example, so I gave you one, in my opinion. Not all the pages are like that, but some are.
By stating the page size I was just trying to show the magazine was significantly greater in length than MU13 – I was not reviewing the issue or comparing it to any other publications.
You claimed that you put together a ‘huge, high quality issue’. Is there quality? Yes. Is it huge? Yes. However I believe that the issue is spaced out way too much.
The size of some of the images are amazing, for example the very first article has an image after pretty much each point. On one occasion you wrote 32 words and just put an image.
I am not saying that you shouldn’t have images. I am just saying that the amount you have per page, and the size of each one in proportion with the amount of text makes it seem like your trying to break a record for longest issue or something.
Not really what I expected to see.
1] Many images used, to make articles appear longer – Why?
2] Large images, some images were bigger than the amount of text on the page.
3] Really long articles – Some of them didn’t really need to be that long.
I like the design, but you guys constantly pad each thing so you have a lot of pages. This issue looks like it should be 30 pages, not 54.
Semantics! Editorials, opinion columns, essays, articles.. one can easily mix up I guess. Well I’m glad you enjoyed the issue; I was pretty excited about the making of Falling Troy myself 🙂 Glad its getting the recognition!
The first article is an exclusive preview; more images illustrate the point: its SUPPOSED to have images for god’s sake!
We masure our issues by words, not pages. Phil happened to write the page count and that’s alright, but nowhere will you find a remark by ourselves about any pagecount. The word count is slightly below 23k, and it is a record. Sure, you say GMTech has 30k, but hey, I never say you guys enter useless articles to achieve that.
As for the issue being spaced out ‘way too much’; the numbers beg to disagree; the issue actually has more words per page than Issue 12, and around the same number of words per page for Issue 13. You read the first 2 pages, saw a lot of screenshots since it is an exclusive preview, and decided to generalize that observation. Not true.
And give me ONE image that is out of place, added to make the issue longer. Just one.
This issue has a word density per page of 433. Previous issues (issues 5-6) had about 550 words per page and we got demands to “declutter” the issue, telling us whitespace and spacing is pretty good.
Now, we’re being accused of making the issue longer. Awesome.
Its an online magazine; why does anyone care about the number of pages to begin with?