Peter Kuchnio

========================================================= The VB Game Development Scene - Promotion and Killer Apps ========================================================= Hmm, when we're talking about the VB Game community we have to define who is in it. Is it anybody who has ever sat down with VB in order to make a game? Is it the core group of people who hang out at sites like Voodoo VB, Lucky's VB Gaming Page, the Nexus, and others? Is it anybody who has a website about their VB game on the web? I think the VB game development scene isn't being promoted enough. Sure we have news sites the Nexus, but it's mostly a news site by programmers for programmers. More importantly, its a news site for VB gamers by VB gamers, I don't know of any website out there right now that is trying to promote the VB scene to anyone outside of the core VB community. The whole community sort of feeds on itself, everything is created, discussed, and played by this one, small, core group of people. I think what the VB game development scene needs right now, is we need to get more people interested in developing games with VB. Also, we need to increase the core community, for example, there are plenty of VB developers that visit sites like Gamedev.net and don't know about sites like the Nexus or Lucky's, and you know what, they should. These sites are great, and if we can get more VB game developers exposed to the quality tutorials and news available on these sites the whole VB Game community will become bigger, more diverse, and much richer (creatively speaking :-) The technical information and tutorials that our core community has created is very awesome. No where else will you find how to program such advanced topics in VB outside of the VB community sites, so we have a monopoly on that =) We just need to expose more VB developers and potential VB developers to this information so that they in turn can produce kick ass games and produce even more technical info. What I'm trying to say is that the VB game dev scene needs to 'come out'. Promote it to other VB developers interested in game development, promote VB works on some of the more mainstream game development sites. After that the VB game scene needs to be promoted to the actual gaming audience, right now it would be way too hard to promote to even the hardcore audience, but it shouldn't be too hard to promote it to people who are primarily gamers but also have a little bit of programming knowledge. The biggest problem for the VB game dev scene is that we have very few pieces of work that we can show off to the rest of the programming world. We have some nice tutorials, a handful of very fun and playable 2D games (the new Rocks game, Galaxy, DDCK ... there are more, but I won't list all of them, that's what the BHGL is for =) and a few 3D demos. It's all very nice, but nothing to really make a jaded Texas developer's jaw drop. The problem as I see it is we don't have anything to show off, where we can say, "Look, this is the VB game dev scene, here is what we can do." What can any of us do about that? Pretty simple really, just keep producing our best work and doing our best to promote it =)

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Peter Kuchnio is:
	The webmaster of Voodoo VB and the project lead at Talos Studios