New plans for Sumea
Sumea Newstation
On the way to developing the Sumea Industry Timeline (which is going to use a mix of xml, asp, flash, and database action), I found some more nifty things to do for Sumea.
A new page on Sumea will be Sumea Newstation. Consider it a rss feed reader on Sumea. It'll grab all the latest headlines from tonnes of games and other news websites, and you'll be able to customize your news page. You can see a work in progress at:
http://www.sumea.com.au/snewsstation.swf
It's in its extremely early stages, but it IS working [;)] Other plans will include it spotting some keywords such as Australian/NZ games and developers and for it to automatically submit news onto Sumea.
My news searching days are nearly over, hurrah!
Sumea Creative Worldwide
I'm planning on opening up Sumea Journals to a world wide audience. It'll be a world wide creative haven for artists and programmers!
The main site will still be covering local content, but the journals will be international with a new subsite on it and hopefully accessed from journals.sumea.com.au. I'll be making the journals a bit prettier and making a lot of adjustments to cater the rest of the world and making it more user friendly, so this won't be appearing over night. Tonnes of other ideas planned to make Journals better. There'll most likely be an international section in the forum as well.
Sumea Timeline
Ok, I'm making another Sumea special page. This will be the Australian/NZ Industry Milestones Chart Timeline. It'll basically be a funky graphic chart listing some of the major milestones achieved in the local industry. It'll be tied to Sumea's database of games releases so we should automatically see a tonne of games listed in the chart. I may have to do this as an interactive Flash movie to cover the ideas I'm having.
It'll include things like when certain studios were created or shut down, dates of when all the great games were released from Exploding Fist to the latest Destroy All Humans! (and the sales numbers to go with it). Other things listed should include the first Free Play conference, when Sumea, the AIE and Qantm came, when Citizen Zero first started development , other trivia and anything else of importance.
If you think there's something that definately should be on that list, please post it in this thread. Accurate dates and info would be appreciated too!
Sumea Salary Survey
Should Sumea start an annual industry salary survey? All submissions would be confidential (anonymous, but you'll have to write down who you work for), and conducted anytime on Sumea.
Heh reminds me when i used to work for gamebiz, we essentially had a folder in our bookmark lists which we (the news team) would scour daily for interesting articles. That can take a loooooong time, so i feel your pain :P Good luck with this project!