Another attempt at an AGS News/Review Site?

Started by Hobbes, Sun 27/06/2021 03:24:14

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Hobbes

Hi all,

With some of the excellent posts going round as people are trying AdventureJam games, etc, and the past efforts of the Unofficial AGS Blog, the AGD Zine etc, I've been toying with the idea of setting up a new AGS blog news site review thing. The site would:

- Have news on AGS and its community as it happens
- Review games
- Preview upcoming games
- Interview AGS people

Nothing new, really, nothing that hasn't been done before. But I was wondering if there were people who would like to join me on the Editorial Team? I'm giving this some more thought over the next few days and will probably get a domain name to host this and invest in some Wordpress plugins to make it look nice. Something like NintendoLife comes to mind. Anyone else have any thoughts on the matter?

FormosaFalanster

It is an excellent idea if you do a more modern approach in both the way you convey it and promote it.

Write it in a modern kind of blog, even podcasts, whatever. And promote it on twitter etc, something that makes it alive. On Twitter I constantly see people supporting the Unity or Godot community. AGS doesn't seem to have a hashtag of its own.

I am not going to be part of the editorial team though, because I am developping more and more so I do not believe it is ethical: probably the people involved in this media should be those whose activity as an AGS developper is little, or long gone, or even none at all. People who spend more time playing these games than making them. Otherwise you're on both sides and it's not really honest. Fortunately, there seem to be quite a lot of people who are not as involved in game making as they used to but who still hang around to play and take a look at the community.

Can be also someone in a hiatus. If I take a few months break from my schedule of intense game making, or if I use a different engine at some point, I'd be happy to contribute, but that's not now!

morganw

Possibly there is some scope to present everything through the development domain adventuregamestudio.github.io. At the moment it is only used for accessing the web build of the manual but there is an open Issue to create an initial frontend which links the development resources, all the current downloads, and the manual:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/616
...if there was an officially endorsed news/review sub-site available in the same place I think that would be OK. Obviously if you would rather make some that is clearly independent of the project itself, or the content wasn't suitable for general consumption, then this approach is probably not suitable. And these are just my opinions so other people would need to be involved in the discussion too. To my mind it is beneficial for both parties as long as both are active.

The GitHub hosting is static file only so Wordpress wouldn't be possible. But you could use any static site generator; building with Jekyll can be done automatically within GitHub (without involving any additional services) but any build process that creates a static web site should be able to be integrated.

If a better domain name came up in future then it would be possible to present everything behind that new domain instead, so the only technical restriction for the content that I can think of right now would be to avoid explicit links to the domain adventuregamestudio.github.io.

Stupot

#3
With the site design being renewed and a general sense of rejuvenation, I actually drafted a post (but didn’t send it) suggesting that we talk about potential podcast/newsletter/blog/improved social media presence.

Here’s the post I never posted:
Quote

Spoiler

I’m loving the work on the redesigns.

This may or may not be the right time to bring this up â€" people have enough on their plates â€" but since the website is getting a fresh now look it makes sense to me to consider renewing some other features that need rejuvenating.

Podcast
The BlueCupTools podcast still gets the occasional very infrequent episode but even when it was more regular it had long since stopped being about AGS. And Grundislav and Ben304 are not as active here as they once were. It would be good to have a new, community-focused podcast with short interviews with community members relating to game projects, deep dives into classic AGS games and series, engine development news and other highlights specific or adjacent to AGS.

Newsletter
There is currently no newsletter that I’m aware of. Peder’s AGS Archive newsletter ran for a little while and was quite fun. Something like that would be nice.

Blog
The old AGS blog was last updated in, like 2014 or something? An up-to-date blog would be nice. It doesn’t have to be super-frequent, but contain information about the latest versions of AGS, and notable game releases or community news. Plus, people could be invited to do some posts about development/design, or specific tutorials about one function or another.

Social media presence
There does exist some bare bones social media activity, but this could be better handled with regular official posts or fun activities, or even just posting links to the blog/podcast etc, were they to exist.
[close]

The reason I didn’t post it is because I already know I’m probably going to have zero time to help out with any of that stuff, so didn’t think I should be the one to make the suggestions.

I’m wondering why we need to talk about domain names. Couldn’t a blog and/or some newsletters be hosted on the main site? I know they’d take up space but I don’t think it would be that much. And if space is a problem then we can at least have a dedicated “official”blog/newsletter page hosted on the site and then just use it to link to a normal wordpress url or something.

eri0o

There's a known computer related website in my country that also has a known web forum and they do something like this: they have posts on the blog part of the website and the comment section is instead a link to this one board on the forums that creates a new post for posts on the blog, so people instead comment on these posts in this board. This specific board is locked so posts only come through this system. The website is all hacked on top of some php board.

So thinking about this, maybe it could use the forum in some way or as comment or even to pull the article from top post (assuming it's a board that only the "editorial" people can post).

AGA

These things always come down to having people willing to keep them running.  SSH's (and Dualnames's) blog ran for years, mostly because they put the effort in to posting frequently.  When they ran out of time and energy, the blog died.  This is what always happens to any such effort...

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