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GMIndie Magazine – Issue 8

The seventh issue of this magazine was supposed to be the last before the release of a new publication, Game Developers Digest, which planned to focus on computer gaming in general and not just Game Maker.

However an eighth issue (2.8MB pdf) has now been published which, at 18 pages, is double the length of the previous longest issue.

Included are reviews of competition entries RC Aerobatics (with an interesting graphic supposedly representing 4.4/5) and The Wizard’s Apprentice, Western Shootout and an interview with the creator of The Hotdog Simulator (“Yes, you’ve never heard of me or my games. Settle down. That’s not important right now…”).

Aside from reviews there is a copy of the TIGRS homepage, the first part of a tutorial on creating multiplayer games, and a short piece about the lack of ‘official’ tutorials that can be viewed from within Game Maker 8.

There is also an ‘inside look’ at GMIndie’s Game Maker Geek 5 book eBook series which includes a comprehensive introduction to Game Maker entitled First Steps and a guide to the GMC.

Please.  If you are going to spend considerable time creating this publication, take a few minutes more to read through it and correct the mistakes prior to release.  In my first read through of the first article I spotted the equivalent of one mistake per paragraph.  It is obvious that much effort has been put into the magazine but it really lets itself down with the high rate of errors.   Some paragraphs aren’t even started with capital letters.

What do you think?

15 Comments

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  1. Philip Gamble :
    “We will not really get anything better than this.”
    We did get GMTech and MarkUp. Did being the key word.

    Some of the current ones are okay. I didn’t notice any obvious errors in, say, Overbyte.

  2. Maybe I’m blind… I’m not seeing any lack of capitalization in “The Wizard’s Apprentice” review. O_O

    I think the layout in their last issue was better.

  3. It’s very easy to be critical. We do not live in a perfect world where Game Maker users are editors, good at graphics or anything of the sort, or above 12 years in age.

    We will not really get anything better than this.

    But I echo the comments. Lower-cased paragraphs make me wanna die.

    • Being critical is giving good feedback. If we weren’t critical, we’d have comments like:

      “The layout was good because you use Game Maker and you’re not meant to make it look professional. It was well written; you can’t be expected to proofread it given you’re only 9 years old and you make games. The magazine was very good because there is no way it could be better.”

      No.

  4. This issue is definitely an improvement over the previous ones. I didn’t care much for the layout, though.

    I also didn’t like the lack of capitalization in “The Wizard’s Apprentice” review, and I think that if you intend to become a regular, informative and professional publication that you at least proof read it, fixing the grammatical and spelling errors as well as give it proper punctuation and capitalization.

  5. The mag looks okay, and it seems like a lot of effort has been put into a layout, but as Phil has said here I wish there was more effort put in to the actual content, the articles. I started reading the review for “The Wizard’s Apprentice,” and after seeing the first words of each sentence being lower-case, I just stopped reading it.

    GMIndie seems to have a lot of media that they want us to consume, but I think they’d be best off just focusing on improving this publication.

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