You guessed it, GGE has hit the 15,000 users mark, just a couple short weeks after reaching 4,000 games. The user tally includes over 2,500 developers. That should be an exciting number for those looking to find people to work with on their game project. It’s also an exciting number for gamers, as they have a chance to play an assortment of innovative titles that are fully developed or in-progress. Developers also have a chance to reach a broad audience of gamers, which, if my elementary school education holds up, approaches 12,500 users. And that doesn’t even include visitors who aren’t signed up to the site.

Don’t worry. With the help of our army of developers and gamers, we’ll snag those visitors eventually too.

GarageGames, Great Games Experiment, and My GM Game are proud to sponsor the first Game Development Competition.

Beginning on Wednesday, July 18th game developers will be able to submit their games into the competition which runs for two months until Tuesday, September 18th.  The contest theme is comedy, so developers are encouraged to get their humor in gear and integrate the funny into the game.  Personally, I like a game with humor in it so this should be fun.

You can find more information about the competition including rules and guidelines on the contest site.  All game entries must be posted on GGE so be sure to check back often to get a glimpse of the new games that are competing. 

Prizes and Voting

At the close of the competition 10 finalists (chosen by a group of judges) from each category will be chosen and thrown into a public vote to determine that category winner.  That means its up to you guys who wins!  Categories include RPG, RTS, Puzzle, and more.  For the full list head here. 

Finally, winners of each category are matched against each other for another vote to determine the Grand Prize Winner.  The Grand Prize Winner will receive the entire Torque Suite (TGB, TGE, TGEA), winners from each category will receive a Torque Game Engine license from GarageGames.  The Combustion Ent Choice Award will receive 1 Year Free Domain Name sponsored by mygmgame.com. 

Hopefully we’ll see a lot of entries and a lot of cool games from this on GGE.  I’ll be voting, hopefully laughing (let’s see if you’ve got what it takes), and enjoying new games, and you should too. 

Get your gaming development tools ready and make those games funny.

Remember!!!

-Dr Wiley

GGE’s user base isn’t the only thing growing exponentially: over 4,000 unique game pages have been created since the Experiment began. The total includes 799 Mac games, 49 Amiga games, 36 cell phone games, 245 Xbox games, and 10 Amstrad CPC games (what is that anyway? anyone?)

Nearly 300 games can be played instantly in your browser using the Play Now function, and hundreds more can be downloaded and played for free. Thanks to everyone who has added a game (or 30) for helping GGE reach this milestone! Let’s continue to make the Great Games Experiment the place to go to find any game from any platform, new or old.

Coming soon: 5,000 games

Good Monday to everyone. It has been a few days, but I’m back with another tip to help make your GGE experience more fulfilling: using images. I think that most people are familiar with the loading of images to display in the slick flash galleries in your profile and game pages, but often people wonder how they can put images in other parts of the profiles. This has been discussed a bit in the forum, but I thought I would go ahead and explain it as best as I could here, for all to see.

There are a few ways that importing images can work, and all methods are similar, it simply depends on which gallery you are using. There is your own personal gallery found in the My Account section, there is the gallery specific to each game page, and there is a gallery specific to each group. The default quote for each gallery is 2mb (2mb for your gallery, 2mb for a games gallery, etc.) This is explained in the help with my images part of the help section. For simplicity I will just talk about the My Images area, but feel free to extrapolate from there. This should give you an idea of how to place images in any uber modules you want. Continue on for the steps.

Read more about Tip of the Day: Image Time

Tip time boys and girls. Today we have a relatively straight forward tip: Subscribing to RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It allows information to be published in a standard XML format that can be accessed via a URL. This is less of a tip than of a reminder, actually. Nearly every list of anything on GGE is available as a RSS feed. The most useful feed in my opinion is the My feed, in My account. I like to keep up with all of the new games as they come in, but the feed in your account is where all the information is: who is recommending what, who plays what, and who is adding what.

The brilliant part is that you can add this feed to virtually any feed aggregator. There are tons of them out there, just look at a google search for “rss readers.” I prefer google reader, but you are free to use whichever service you prefer. You can also drag and drop the rss icon into the toolbar of applicable web browsers and read the feed that way.

The easiest way to subscribe is to click on the subscribe button:

Then, just copy and paste the URL of the feed into your RSS Reader. It’s that simple. Remember that nearly all of the lists on GGE (new games, most viewed profiles, recent gamers, etc.) are RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.

Well, it’s Monday and it’s tip time. Have you ever thought “this profiles good, but I could make it way better?” Well, you can easily request to become a contributer for that game and have full editing privileges to add new text, videos, images and whatever else you can think of.

The first step is to go to the game profile for the game you would like to contribute to. Then click on the “Become a Contributer” tab on the right sidebar:

When you click that tab, a message box will appear asking if you do want to become a contributer.

Clicking “OK” sends and notification to the user who submitted the game for approval. They must accept your request in order for you to be able to edit the page. However, after 2 days (48 hours) if the user has not accepted your request, it will be automatically approved and you will have access to the game. This is to allow users to become contributers of games whose submitting user may have become inactive. This also gives the user who submitted a game some room to deny contributers if they so wish.

When someone asks to be a contributer you will get a notification and a message that looks like this:

If you have contributers on a game profile that you were controlling, you can manage those contributers using the “Games” module on your account page. Simply click on contributers for whichever game and you can remove, ban or invite contributers from this page. And at the risk of adding one too many images, the contributer managing screen looks like this:

So there you have it. Become a contributer and make your favorite game the hottest page on the site. Again, any questions just add a comment and they will be answered.