Two Game Maker magazines have today released copies.
This morning GMAG published their third issue (pdf, left click only). None of the content was of particular interest to me as I don’t think there is anything Game Maker related in it that I had not already seen besides a single game review.
Much of the content is given over to news and opinion of other Game Maker media projects. I know this is a valid criticism often made of this website but it to me it seems very strange to see so much attention given to other Game Maker magazines, and so little to everything else, in a Game Maker magazine.
Game Maker’s Digest returns with its second weekly issue. It’s noticeably shorter than the launch issue but this is to be expected given the short turnaround-time required with such an ambitious release schedule.
The second paragraph of the welcome message begins “You know, it actually takes up quite a bit of my time writing these magazine issues“. Brian continues to write “First off, there weren’t that many good games published and I ran out of ideas for articles. Sadly, I wasn’t able to write the entire tutorial for this week, so that’ll be put in next week.” Perhaps GMIndie have only just realised how much work needs to be done in so little time producing a weekly magazine. GMWeekly managed 17 mostly-on-time issues but the typical page count in these was about 7 or 8.
The magazine remains subscription only which I know annoys many people however as it is released under a license that enables anyone to share it feel free to post a link in the comments.
Grabeorama says that the GMAG schedule will be disrupted because of his holidays over the summer. Why don’t the two magazines just merge their efforts? With magazines emerging at such an astonishing rate I have decided that from now on I will only feature magazines which I think are worthy of a download.
So only magazines that are worthy of a download….
I’m gonna need to put alot of work into my next issue.
June 12th…
Read some of the interesting bits of GMD 2.
So Frederick was a fictional character. That’s probably a positive for the whole world. And Brian is a 19-year-old expert. It’s a shame he isn’t capitalising on that fact.
From http://twitter.com/GMIndie/status/15055613085:
“@GameMakerBlog thanks so much for publishing that. Can’t wait for you to read all about it in GMD 3 =3 Hope you can take an insult, or two”
Wow… I forgot how much I don’t miss the GMC.
Your American spelling of the noun ‘licence’ hurts me deeply, Phil. 😛
Actually, they can share articles. Just not the magazine file. So your both wrong. Hope that clears it up.
-Bretboy129 ~ Bret Hudson (Co-Host of GMIndie…)
Probably be best to alter its licence, then. From Phil’s link:
“to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work”
That clearly states that you can copy the work, not necessarily just single articles but also as an unedited, full PDF, and redistribute it as such and at no cost.
“it is released under a license that enables anyone to share it” is kinda contradictory to what the notification email said: “Warning: DO NOT SHARE DOWNLOAD LINKS or your subscription will be terminated.”
It was overall, though, a good read. Still, as seems to be commonplace with GMIndie stuff, a few areas that could do with improvement – for example, the “cage match”-like section makes sense but the “Team X victories” page after it seems completely redundant and irrelevant. I think the star images could do with a change too. But all in all, as I said, it was a good read, in general very well presented and rather satisfyingly proofread.
GMAG: Still needs touching up but it’s definitely got the potential to be good, especially given the staff count. Hopefully, above all, it’ll continue to be released every fortnight – if it does, reliability could be its ace.