About

The Team

David Andersson

Wrote some articles in the start but is now focusing on developing the page.

PHP developer, page and template designer and server administrator

Calle Ekdahl

Has written most of the articles on this site. Has developed a major part of the user experience on this site.

PHP developer, contact person, head of marketing and responsible for the content of the site

History

Game Maker Tutorials sprung from an idea of summer 2006. It was due to two things: the lack of official tutorials and the inefficient FAQ-forum of the GMC. Calle (that is me) contacted David about this and after some persuasive talk David agreed that to help. Both Calle and David had learnt Game Maker and GML at an early age and they knew how tricky it could be and they thought about how they could making it easier, while constructing the web page.

To be honest, for the first week or so we used the free Google blog software, however that didn't last very long. Both Calle and David knew how to do PHP and MySQL and they soon realized that what they wanted to do could not be kept within any freeware. They therefore started out on their own. It happened to be so that David just some months earlier had begun a project called Velosider CMS, which provided a solid ground for the new homepage. Even our first design was kept as a blog though, and the idea was to add tutorials daily.

While Calle was occupied writing about GML David therefore took command of the website programming and the layout and a month after the first release, gmtutorials got its first redesign. The name of the homepage at this time was thegamemakerblog.com and soon became pretty popular with a visitor rate of about 50-100 visitors a day. Important functions were still missing though, for the idea with the site was not only to provide tutorials by our own; as was stated in the original idea we also wanted to relieve the GMC; which is why we wanted to add the possibility for users to publish their own articles. It took some time to persuade David to do this though, because we both had school and only a little time.

When it finally came the homepage had been up for more than six months already and it had grown in size to include about 80 tutorials, and about 50 users. Cooperation was settled after - literary speaking - head-hunting we got examples from a few kind Game Maker users and they improved the variety of the site with their examples. Later when seeing how popular examples were we understood that we needed to make it easier to publish those; and added an upload-service. This upload-service we were determined to make the best, and we allowed an unlimited number of file-upload without having to register, and hot-linking allowed. It became pretty popular after a while but our users did not contribute to the site as we wanted.

We basically did everything ourselves, and that was not really the intention. We worked in several ways to make it easier to publish own articles, and we still do. Calle now worked a lot on marketing the site; for he knew the content was popular, that had been said in comments, and statistics showed that up to 70 % added the site to their favourites. All he had to do was spreading the word. One thing Calle did was to create an affiliation-system, affiliating with many of the big sites. Slowly the number of visitors increased even more, and the number of members as well. As factors out of control for both Calle and David limited the time that they could spend on the site and therefore the site slowly became more inactive. However, we wanted all the time to give a new start and planned intensively during the period of what things we could do to improve our service to the Game Maker community.

We came up with a lot of things; for our service was not at all perfect at this time. We decided as a start to change name from the previously used The Game Maker Blog to Game Maker Tutorials - which would be describe what kind of things we could offer. Vital in our future plan was the community: this was how we would finally be able to make our visitors to involve themselves into the site. All we did hence moved in this direction.

David at the time worked on a project called VeloFrame which would make it easier for us to later on to do what we wanted. The site as it is today (although still under construction). It was going towards summer holiday, one year since we started up and also the only time of the year that we could work effectively. Both Calle and David programmed all summer and eventually came to result. Game Maker Tutorials V2, Beta, yet didn't have all the functions that we wanted but with all the potential in the world. New features included bbcode for the articles, ratings, and separate example-upload as to - yet again - make it easier for users to contribute. The version two revolutionized also with its much better design and usability. That is why, I guess, the site has also been increasing heavily in the time passed since its release. At this time we are increasing in the number of users more rapidly than ever. This is very good for our community-plans. I am sure, that this site will only gain popularity with time and nothing else. At this time we still have big plans and lots to do.

30/10/2008: First addition in over a year to this text. Not much has happened. Calle travelled to the U.S. in order to study there for one year, he quit writing article for the site at that time. The new design cut advertisement profit down to zero and so we were back to actually losing money by running the site. We decided to wait and see what would happen, as we hoped that the new functions that we had implemented over the summer would be appriciated. And somehow they were, because the number of members sky-rocketed from 100 to 500 in some months; but noone contributed much and so the site appeared to be dead, and only our statistics proved different. According to our statistics we had more readers now than we had ever had before. We wanted people to contribute but few did and so in February 2008 we realized that we'd never make a third version as was originally planned. We did get together a forum but that was it; all the other grand plans were put aside as we couldn't see a clear benefitor from our efforts. In the summer of 2008 not much was done on the site except some small changes. This past month we've added a section for video tutorials and we'll let everything stay up for those that can still learn from this site. At this point we do not do this for ourselves, as we don't get anything from it and we're not active in the Game Maker community anymore. If there'll be some change in the future though, maybe action taken from YoYoGames, this site may be popularised. Otherwise, just enjoy the site the way it is!

Technical information

The system is written in PHP5 and MySQL5. It's running David's framework/CMS called veloFrame that you can help developing with it's SVN repo.
The template engine it's using is called Smarty.
We're using mod_rewrite to make better URLs.
The site is hosted at VS-HS