History of the Interguild, Part 3: Finding the Right Home

At last, we've reached the final installment of this series. In Part One, we saw how the Interguild community was formed by players who fell in love with the game Hannah and the Pirate Caves (HATPC), and in Part Two we saw how TNT, the creators/owners of the game, nearly destroyed this community through their repeated neglect and mismanagement of HATPC.

In this post we'll look at the story behind the various websites that have housed our community throughout the years, how they've affected the course and identity of the Interguild, and how we found our ultimate home in interguild.org.

This was a very difficult post to write. The major challenge was in figuring out how to properly organize these ideas together into a coherent article without confusing you with various jumps in chronology. It was because of this design dilemma that I finished this post so late, along with the fact that school is getting very busy lately. At one point, I tried staying up until 5am one Saturday night to see if I could finish this, and I still didn't finish. But now the wait is over...

The UA Game Developers Club has Gone Global: Join Now!

Remember how in my last post, I mentioned how I made a tribute image for the Extra Credits Facebook wall? Well, the first guy to respond to that was a student from the Netherlands (no, Interguilders, it wasn't jellsprout). He was asking me to respond to what he recently posted on EC's wall. It turns out that he's currently making a game with other students for a course requirement, but he needed help with some serious problems that was hurting his development team.

After I gave him some great advice from Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design, he wanted to add me as a friend on Facebook seeing as we were both students interested in making games, it would be great to share thoughts and resources in order to learn more.

Most of you already know about how I started a club at my university last semester called the Video Game Developers Club. We recently started our own Facebook group, so I invited my new Dutch friend to join the group. And just like that, we became an international club!

At first I didn't take the "international" aspect of the club too seriously, but today I started thinking, why not? Game development is already one of the most diverse and interdisciplinary industries out there, so why not join an equally diverse group?

Update on Email Subscriptions

This isn't that big of a deal, but I figured that I might as well let you guys know. As I explained a few weeks ago, those of you who subscribe to this blog via email get the email notifications some time between at 11pm-1am GMT -6:00, which is about 10pm in my timezone. I realized that I've been publishing of the blog posts after midnight, which means that you probably have to wait an entire day to get the email notification. So I moved the email sending time to about 3am-5am GMT -7:00.

That means that you will now get your emails about five hours later than usual, but the whole point of this is so that they don't come a day late.

In Other News...

Check out this huge pic I made for Extra Credits to celebrate the end of the Guest Artists Marathon. I posted it on their Facebook wall about an hour ago.

Click here for full resolution

If you don't know what Extra Credits is or why they've been having a guest art marathon, check out these articles I've written on them.

Understanding QR Codes through Game Design

Wow, four new blog posts within the past week? That can only mean one thing: this post is for another homework assignment.

But don't let that turn you off, because I am very excited about this post. This will be my first entry into a series of posts called Understanding through Game Design, where I analyze non-game-related topics as if they were games (I also plan to analyze actual games eventually). The idea isn't all that crazy, because any game designer will likely tell you that it's quite a challenge to find any form of human activity that cannot be explained in terms of game design.

So today, I'll be talking about Quick Response codes, also known as QR codes. When I first heard about these a few years ago, someone had told me that they were supposed to be a replacement for bar codes that could store data in two dimensions rather than one.

I never imagined that they would become the widespread phenomenon that they are today. In this post, I'll be trying to figure out why exactly people are having so much fun with these things.

Indie Games and the Crowdfunding Revolution

It's about time I started balancing out some of these super long articles with smaller ones that are more straight-to-the-point. So the point of this post will be to fulfill my latest class assignment, which demands that everyone in the class make their next blog post as a response to an article about monetizing social media (actually, I think I've already written about this topic...).

This might be a bit of a stretch (like almost all of my posts so far), but I'm going to be responding to a very interesting article from a few months ago called "The Crowdfunding Revolution: Perspectives." That article was actually the first part of a two-part series, with the second part named "The Crowdfunding Revolution: Making Your Choice."

Crowdfunding services – websites that act as both a social network to connect projects with backers and as a marketplace or escrow house for project funding – have become a popular business model in the last two years, and several more have sprung up alongside Kickstarter, each with their own perks, quirks, and twists on the basic model.

These articles take a look at the growing popularity of crowdfunding as a tool for independent game developers. Those of you who follow this blog might have realized by now that I like history, and so what caught my attention was the idea that this business model could potentially lead to significant changes in the game industry.

History of the Interguild, Part 2: TNT Ruins Everything

During part one of this series, I pointed out many of the good things that the creators of the game Hannah and the Pirate Caves (HATPC) did to help its fan community grow. In this post, I will go through all of the major mistakes that TNT made with the game during the past eight years and how the community has reacted to each of these issues.