Blog for Jim Rowley at GarageGames.com

Sunday May 30 21:42

Jim Rowley — 2004-05-30T21:42:52+00:00

Website moving forward.

My new website www.funcited.com is finally coming together and starting to move forward. I've designed the site as a news and links portal using PHP-Nuke and I'm very happy with my progress thus far. I am currently receiving an average of about 25 unique visits daily, but few are actually registering at this point. This will certainly change as I begin to create more incentive for the free registration. I am researching the best ways to actually get rank on search engines and I'm finding the competition is steep! I believe the best way might be to manually go out and discuss the site with other like minds to set up link exchanges since Google and other engines use external links to sites as a big factor in ranking. Please come take a look and leave me some feedback. I believe I've ironed out most of the glitches now and content is starting to build. Thanks for all of GarageGames fans support, you guys are great! By the way, you can also get a sneak peak at my first title under development using Torque on the site. I have remained fairly quiet about this project on this site until some of the copyright and other legalities are fully settled. Come on fellow Indies, let's take the gaming industry by storm!

On a seperate note... I have thus far been quite unhappy with the Bush administration and John Kerry is not my choice for a great president in the future either. I think I'll write in Jeff Tunnell for pres :)

Wednesday May 5 10:07

Jim Rowley — 2004-05-05T10:07:28+00:00

Website doors are opening!

I've finally had enough time to put together the framework for my new website, funcited! I'm using PHP-Nuke for content management, PHP-BB for forums, and have plans to use osCommerce for a store portal. Opensource and SourceForge sure do rule the planet!

My site is very new, but I'm aiming to create a fun community site for gamers and game developers. I'd love to have any of the garagegames developers come say hello and get involved in this community. I still have plenty of space for your involvement with content, news, and forums, so if you have your own serious project without a website or without time to maintain one, you might consider using funcited as your home.

As the days go on, I will be adding content and site updates daily.

Please come say hello!

funcited.com

Tuesday Apr 3 22:10

Jim Rowley — 2001-04-03T22:10:00+00:00

Plodding along

I guess there is just not enough time in the day... I've been so wrapped up in Tribes 2 and Black and White lately that I haven't spent as much time as I would like in trying to learn Direct3D programming. The more I learn about developing a full-scale 3D game the more daunting a project it seems. I guess as I progress over the next year or two I will probably document what I am learning in order to assist other indie developers in the future. Anyway, I definately know that I will want to get involved with a team or teams over the next year or two to help drive my learning curve. I've already heard from a couple of teams working on projects out there, but if you have a project and if you are looking for a part-time scripter or mod programmer, please let me know! I'm sure that it would help me dramatically to bounce ideas off other developers in the forums here as well. Its not that I can't program but structure and modularity is definately very important... COM programming or the like seems like it would be a very important aspect of development these days. By the way, have any of you other developers out there used the open-source engines that are posted here such as Crystal Space or the Nebula engine? What are your thoughts about these engines? Are any of them worthwhile for actual game development? The nebula engine in particular looks promising to me...