freeg131: Philip Gamble

the blog and personal portal of Phil Gamble

I acquire mygmgame.com

A couple of days ago I took over MyGMGame.com a website offering free file hosting - predominately to users of Game Maker.

The site is quite big with over 19,000 files uploaded taking up 1GB of web space - ridiculously small when compared to the huge filehosts - but certainly one of the biggest used by members of the game maker community.

MyGMGame certainly needs a lot of work - the site is littered with typos and features that either don’t work or are incomplete, and the design varies across the site. The biggest change taking over MyGMGame will bring is that I will have to work with ASP on a Windows server.

Having never created or hosted an ASP site on a Windows server before (apart from one minor homework) I really didn’t know where to start. I brought some hosting from goDaddy, before realising that they give you free hosting with every domain you register there which in my case meant I had about 10 free hosting accounts ready to go (waste of $10). Eventually I stuck a deal with the creator of the site to host on their computer.

The site becoming available is actually very good news as recently (past week or so) I had created a list of 6 GameMaker sites to consider purchasing and MyGMGame was one of my top two picks (I won’t mention the other one).

The site has over 900 members, a PageRank of 3 a scarily bad Alex Rank of around 1.4M. I hope to develop the site to complement GameMaker Blog and indeed the first thing I did after taking over the site was switch their news provider from our main rivals to our own.

Game Maker at School

You may know that I run several websites which relate to YoYoGames’ Game Maker software as well as contribute to the MarkUp game development magazine which focuses on the Game Maker platform.

Despite the apparent lack of recent developments in Game Maker, Game Maker 8 is not due until at least 2009, Game Maker’s appeal is growing. So much so that in this year’s ‘activity week’ at my school it looks as if one of my computing teachers will be running a Game Maker course.

My major GameMaker projects: