Another new GameMaker ‘magazine’ has been released, just a day after Prodigy Game Magazine hit the GMC. This magazine however takes the much more practical approach of being a PowerPoint slide show distributed as a password protected download.
“GRandER” – (suggestions regarding the origins of the name wanted!) – features a review of Iji a very short ‘review’ of Iji, an interview with 2DCube (top marks for originality there). And that’s it.
@2dcube
I think the title is quite a compliment to you 2dcube. coming of with great games one after the other is good enough. There’s no denying the Martin is great, but I would be Rolling On the Floor Laughing, if someone didn’t call you great.
Some people are just getting sick of seeing your name now 2Dcube. 😀 Not me though. 🙂
FredFredrickson has done interviews with the vast majority of GameMaker magazines – see http://gamemakerblog.com/2008/04/07/game-maker-magazines/
In two days we saw the release of two new gamemaker magazines both with 2DCube interview.
Yeah I don’t get the title either…
Care to explain? Thanks 😀
2Dcube accepts too many interviews…
@Title:
Why, is 2Dcube a local moderator now? 😀
*facepalm*
I admit Powerpoint has it’s limitations. However most people will have Powerpoint 2003 or an Open Office viewer or the Microsoft viewer.
You can select in Powerpoint that the presentation should run in windowed mode and you can include buttons in your slides to handle the navigation.
HTML can be downloaded, just zip the whole thing. But I would far prefer if I don’t have to download it and can just go through it and just watch what I’m interested in. HTML also means you can include server side scripting to make things like navigating and searching far easier. Just set up some blogging software, paste your texts in there and add some screenshots. HTML also means you can get additional features such as comments and user ratings to see how well your articles are received and generate a community.
HTML being more difficult to design for and more difficult to be cross browser / platform are problems for the authors. I specify as a reader what I’d like to use. I really dislike it that if I open a PDF in my browser that I can’t open a link in a new tab but that it automatically opens in my current replacing the PDF. I dislike that I can’t easely change the zooming settings and just have the text flow around the content. I dislike that that a PDF doesn’t open instantly.
If you want very complex layouts then PDF might indeed be easier for content creators then HTML. But personally I don’t care about the layout, I care about the content. I also don’t care about the ease of creating, I care about the ease of reading.
At the moment, most Game Maker magazines are still interesting enough for me to ignore the bad usability. Nevertheless, if the magazines where easier to read I would probably spend more time at different articles, sometimes bookmark then and forward the URL to other people that are interested in this.
It was way too short. At least it looked alright, I guess, but then with PowerPoint the vast majority of themes are defaults found within the program itself.
With a PowerPoint format you have to have PowerPoint or other viewer, which not everyone might have. It also means it first has to be opened and the slide show watched which makes navigation extremely difficult and you can’t skip between windows while it’s running.
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With HTML, one can not download it and is much more difficult to create good designs for than PDF. There’s also the problem of it rendering differently in different browsers and platforms.
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PDFs can be created with ease and read on many platforms, downloaded or viewed online, will look the same anywhere, and offers far more power in terms of how they can look. There’s also the advantages of the choice of many programs to use to create PDFs
The format as a Powerpoint file is certainly interesting and offers several options. The implementation could use some work though.
However I’d be quite interested in a magazine in Powerpoint format while using the features of the format such as video.
The current video releases have low quality video which makes text hard to read. Combining them with Powerpoint should present a more useful format.
I’d be quite interested to see some innovation in the formats for magazines. While PDF is great for print, nobody is going to print out the magazines.
[[que reply of the one person that does]]
There are many formats far more suited for distribution online. Even plain old HTML would work better then PDF in my personal opinion.
Probably because no right-minded well-respected magazine would accept contributions of that quality.
All online PDF magazines should be in landscape. I hate having to scroll through portrait and fiddle with zooming. Just throwing my two cents in.
Heh, why do they never contribute to existing mags like MarkUp?
Robin