A Bit About Me

How wonderfully ironic that on the 1st anniversary of the inception of Free Gamer, I forgot to actually post. Lack of time and focus on work robbed me of the time required to bring you the usual high quality rambling.

Another thing that seems forgotten is the Free Gamer Awards I so enthusiastically thought up a few weeks back. Fear not, as soon as I am done procrastinating planning them properly, it will all come together. Fortunately they are entitled the Free Gamer Awards 2007 which gives me another 6 months to execute them. *grin*

As you may have noticed, I called this post, "A bit about me." I won't be talking about myself - sorry to disappoint you - just a bit about this blog. (Yes, a blog can have a sense of self, y'know.) I feel that one of the reasons FG has people reading it daily is because I stay fairly on-topic. I don't talk about much else other than Free Software games (ok, throw in a few freeware titles) and the aspects surrounding the development of said games.

One of the principle reasons I created FG was because there was a lack of a similar resource at the time - the Linux Game Tome was probably the closest thing but that's dedicated to Linux games meaning some open source titles never get exposure and many commercial ones do. The thing is, commercial game publishers can afford to market themselves. And open source is open source, regardless of platform. I wanted to put to use all the otherwise-useless open source game knowledge I was accumulating each day. The end goal was to highlight the best Free games out there and give exposure to upcoming projects.

In that regard I think FG has somewhat succeeded. Up to 1000 hits daily (~950) is a decent platform for giving an open source game or two a bit of extra traffic.

On top of that, this blogging thing can become an obsession. Seeing the hit rate rise, seeing where traffic comes from, seeing how much in paltry adsense revenue you can acquire (I'm almost at $80 from something like 100,000 hits), it becomes an addiction. Now the addiction has passed, the challenge is to keep it going with interesting content without having to spend upwards of 4-5 hours a day doing research.

In that regard I have failed slightly. To get FG where I want it to be in terms of content (the lists, articles, etc) I need to spend more time on it than I can. So, sadly, it becomes a slow process of getting it there and I just hope some or most of you keep checking in whilst I grind it out. It'll be there eventually, it's just in life certain things must come first.

Anyway, time to put an end to this narcisissm.

The FIFE team are running a contest to lure in some graphics contributions. Win the contest and get a feature of your choice coded into FIFE. Please, somebody, create an awesome graphic, win the contest, then make them add in support for mighty morphing power rangers. Or take it seriously, whichever you prefer. :-)

Until next time (which will be Monday - I'm away all weekend), enjoy creating and playing those Free games.