DPERRY.COM (Lots of new Updates.)

Wow, there’s been a mountain of changes to the DPERRY.COM site.
Firstly everything is properly organized now, and we’ve also added an industry NEWS section.
This NEWS section is hosted by DIGG.COM, which happens to be both my favorite General News site, and also their blog DiggNation is my favorite video blog. If you have a video iPod and you like geek news, SIGN UP! Note: When you sign up to the website (FREE), you can track the stories your friends like, you can also give a story a thumb’s up and it will be ranked higher in the news. To add me as a friend, just add my nickname: shinydp
We also have upgraded the FORUM software, and one of our users RealityEngine has added a new DPCHAT interface. (Thanks for that contribution.)
Our INTERVIEWS section has just bloomed in the last month or so (thanks to Evan Shamoon), you will find interviews with all kinds of people including the superstar award winners. We have plenty more coming and hope to continue to give you insight into how others opened doors in the industry, and how some became very successful.
We have added a WIKI now to our collection of sites. I can’t tell you how important these are in just about all video game development studios, so this is a GREAT place to really get comfortable with them. Having “Wiki Jedi Master” on your resume only helps these days. The Wiki is there to allow you to do a ton of things… (When you visit the Wiki site, go ahead and register in the top right corner of the screen, then you are ready for action.)
(1) You can work on ‘Open Source’ game projects together. (Getting a demo that you can show to a company is a very valuable ticket, the more talent you can get to help you, the better.) So this is a way for you to lay out your plans, invite input, discuss, brainstorm, grow it, then find talent to help make it. (For those that manage to make a game demo drop out the other end, you will not only have learnt how to get a project off the ground, but also you will have learnt real world production skills.)
(2) You can help me! I can’t tell you how many ideas I have for helping students, so PLEASE HELP ME! The more help I get, the more ideas I will kick off. How could you help? Just click HERE.
(3) The DP Challenge is now hosted live, and we already have some people that have posted the games they have reviewed so far. This is one of the most difficult challenges I’ve ever heard of and we already have our first person that’s passed the test. Now it’s your turn!
(4) I’ve been writing a reference book on game design for about 5 years and have found out that I just don’t have any spare time. So I hired a ghost writer (Rusel DeMaria) to work on it with me. We made good progress in the planning, but I need to go through every page to add my own flavor to it. So Rusel kindly kept nudging me, otherwise the book would never get published. So I’ve decided to just make it Open Source, to lay it out there, and to let students work on it with me, to try to turn it into a really useful resource for brainstorming. The goal is simply to document everything to do with game design. About 900 pages are done, we just need to fix them, then add the other 90,000 pages. The idea of the book is to help inspire you. So if I said “Design a new weapon now, that nobody has ever seen before“, I can make that easier if you first read this chapter: WAYS TO DIE
(5) I had a crazy idea to try to convince some of the best game development book writers in the world to contribute their books to students for free. (One by one, I’m sending them this NOTE). We already have the first book pretty much complete thanks to Andre LaMothe. Thanks goes out to Jeff Edwards for the HARD HARD work he’s put into Transcribing this book to Wiki format, so you can edit it, update it and keep it alive for years to come. Andre gave us another BOOK and this one is being transcribed by DanielMD one of our long time supporters of these sites. Daniel, you ROCK. If you are an author, please help out by contributing your work to this free library.
(6) We are also tracking all the videos that teach game development. Please help us find more. If you are a teacher, I will pay the costs to record you teaching your subject if you are willing to share that with students around the world.
(7) What if you don’t know how to use a Wiki? (Just play around in our Sandbox and learn the formatting rules.)
I have more in the pipe, and will keep you updated. Anyway, enjoy the progress, and thanks to ALL our volunteers for helping. (I will be thanking you all individually in the coming blogs.)
David Perry.