Really? A whole new GarageGames.com?

You heard right. We're getting really close to a complete relaunch of GarageGames.com. We've been working on this project since last summer, and we're really stoked to finally see the fruits of our labors come to bear on the great interwebs.


Since he's been putting in some major overtime to get this finished, I'm saving the big blog for Jacob Fike, our lead web dev. He's been at it pretty hard for the last few months, so I'm sure he's seeing PHP dance behind his eyelids even when he sleeps. Rest assured that we are keeping all the functionality on the new site that you have come to know and love, including:

• Personal blogs for anyone with a free GG.com account to share in game development trials and triumphs
• Public and Private forums for major engines to share code and ask questions
• Links to hundreds of pages of useful engine documentation, sorted in an intuitive index
• Download links to all the GG.com products you own

Plus we've added some new things we think you'll like:

• Featured blogs, so we can show off the best projects on our site
• Recommended products so you know which 3rd party products work with all the different flavors of Torque
• Revamped search capabilities for the entire site
• Much simpler, more concise site navigation

Of course, I'm not allowed to do a blog without a few obligatory screenshots, so here are a few sneak peaks:


A lot of the content of the new site will remain the same. Our front page still directs you to four distinct game development solutions, depending on your needs.

We've drastically cleaned up our navigation bars so that it's much easier to find things, especially for a new user. Frequent visitors (i.e. you guys reading this blog) will be happy to see the Community get a large chunk of our page real estate, as always.

Our 3rd party providers will be happy to see that we provide links to their recommended products not only on the engine page, but also for cross selling. This makes it easier to see what other customers are buying.

We are shooting for a full launch on Tuesday, January 13th, so please forgive us a few days of moving things around. Do be aware that if you post or comment on any blogs or forums between now and launch, there is a chance it will be lost in the shuffle. We'll do our best to update our databases current, but make back-ups just in case. If we run into any unexpected launch problems (we're doing all the ritual sacrifices, but you never know...), I'll let you know in this blog. In the unlikely event that something goes awry with your account, please contact support@garagegames.com.


Just one favor we'd like to ask of you when the new site goes live. Please do not use origin-www or the direct IP address to get to the new site. This is really important. For the past year, we've been dealing with a rare, but frustrating issue through our CDN (Akamai) where users would get a screen that said "Service Unavailable" when trying to connect. To bypass Akamai and go around this error, some users have been entering the IP address for GG directly, or using origin-www.garage..... as an alternative. We're very confident that the "Service Unavailable" issue will be disappearing entirely when the new site is up. It's being hosted in a different location, so connection issues to Akamai should be resolved. However, for each user that bypasses Akamai and connects to our hosted hardware directly, it plugs an available socket. If too many of these are plugged, Akamai can't process requests and neither can the hosted site. Please use www.garagegames.com exclusively from the time the new site is up and discontinue using origin-www or the direct IP. I'll have Jacob remind you in his post launch blog so you don't forget. ^_^

See you with a new face, and until then, happy game development!