GameDev.net

Last updated
GameDev.net
Type of site
game development portal
Available inEnglish
OwnerGameDev.net, LLC
Created byDave Astle, Kevin Hawkins, John Munsch, Don Thorp, and Michael Tanczos
Website GameDev.net
Alexa rankDecrease Positive.svg 24,116 (April 2014) [1]
RegistrationOptional
Launched1999 June [2]
Current statusOnline

GameDev.net is a website dedicated to game development launched in June 1999 by Kevin Hawkins, Dave Astle, Michael Tanczos, John Munsch, and Don Thorp, among others. It serves as a central trade resource and media outlet for the video game industry, with particular regards to hobbyist and independent developers, who form a community. The site features articles, forums, blogs, jobs, contractors, contests, developer profiles, and more.

Contents

4 Elements contest

GameDev.net used to host a well known annual competition known as the "4 Elements" contest (abbreviated 4E, usually followed by the numerical iteration), which typically started in September and lasted for 6 months. It was a sponsored game development competition that required the contenders to create a game based on four different elements (revealed before the start of the competition). The contest was originally centered around the classical elements, although the focus has since shifted to random and seemingly unrelated elements to encourage innovations in game play rather than graphics.

GDNet+

GameDev.net is a free website but now offers a paid membership called GDNet+. Among the offered services and features are: additional site features, access to beta programs, giveaways, and recognition for supporting the site.

Hosted sites

GameDev.net also hosts a number of other game development sites. The most popular is NeHe, a comprehensive suite of OpenGL tutorials originally written by Jeff "NeHe" Molofee, and NeXe, a wiki-based website on DirectX containing various tutorials and other information. Another hosted site is the Game Development Wiki (formerly the Game Programming Wiki or gpwiki).

The video game industry is using Agile software development to create new programs. This is a reaction to the Software crisis in the late 1960s, which had a lack of computer programs at all. [3] Part of the workflow is, to create a Postmortem documentation. This is document, which describes the game development process, and why the project has failed. The gamedev.net platform collects postmortem documents [4] , which is an example for collaborative learning. A similar platform is Gamasutra.

See also

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References

  1. "Gamedev.net Site Info". Alexa Internet . Retrieved 2014-04-01.
  2. "About Us". GameDev.net. GameDev.net. Retrieved 2008-08-22.
  3. Fabio Petrillo and Marcelo Pimenta and Francisco Trindade and Carlos Dietrich (2009). "What went wrong? A survey of problems in game development". Computers in Entertainment. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 7 (1): 1. doi:10.1145/1486508.1486521.
  4. Cristiano Politowski and Lisandra Fontoura and Fabio Petrillo and Yann-Gaël Gueheneuc (2016). Are the old days gone?. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering - GAS. ACM Press. doi:10.1145/2896958.2896960.