CONCEPT: ADVANCED RPG MAKER - AN EZINE

First off - This is a cool thing/idea.

Second off - I know it's early days but something that bothers me after going through the zine is the brevity of each section. Not that brevity can't be a good thing when a topic isn't beefy enough to warrant it - it's just that in the current format I can't imagine any super-in-depth segments happening with such brief and cursory summaries. I get that it's just you, Amy, basically doing everything right now though so I get there's some limits on what can be reasonably done atm and given a small-magazine format it's actually pretty tightly packed, if not in-depth.

Anyway I spotted this:

and wondered - weird coincidence or error?

I like it

I dunno, I kind of liked that it had more things, rather than long winded articles of just a couple things. I would suggest that if you do decide to go more indepth on some things, add more pages rather than cutting out the short articles. I would probably lose interest because honestly most things about RPGMaker aren't interesting to me. The more things you have the more interests you will hit with more readers. If you add links the reader can go to the source for more information if they are really interested in learning more, unless you intend for this emag to be a main source of full info.

Like, I only need to read so much about a game or that FF6 SDK. If I like it I'm going to search for it, if not I'm just going to skip to the next article. Assuming you are just putting a spotlight on it, rather than a review. If it's a serious review, indepth can be interesting.

Things like editorials and dev spotlights, where the focus is on people and the community would be suited for indepth. Trends and social aspects too. Not saying other things shouldn't be indepth.

I like the tips and tricks section. Easter eggs and funny bugs/errors in popular games could be fun(but probably not much to draw from). Some kind of lists, like best games, best art, new games. Where you just show maybe a screenshot of lots of games(you do have something like this). Kind of like the frontpage of RMN with new and notable and highly rated. More coverage of events from each community, with spotlights on the winners later on.

Also, I'm not likely to remember to look for new issues. If you had an emailing list I'd join and get it in my inbox and actually read it.

This is very nice! Although it may be nice to find a ranking of "active" members in your ranking list. I'm pretty sure that even though RRR has had 106k members in the past, now it's not as active. At least it was like that the last time that I been there. Dramas happened, people left, etc.

Speaking of that, feel free to feature any of my reviews in this magazine. One gem that I discovered recently was SnowOwl's Reap and Sow. It is currently in development and kind of goes under the radar. Here's my review.

^w^ This is a pretty good idea, but...
...it needs a serious makeover, i.e, better page design.

What do I mean with this? Better layout, creative fonts (Berlin Sans FB is my favourite font, but it just DOESN'T fit there) and better image positioning. If you notice, magazines make all the pages look vivid and cool, and they're still readable. But those pages use bad background colours and are pretty dull.

'Cmon! It can be done better! :)

PS: I can help *wink wink*

If I may suggest, this seems like a great way to let people know what events are happening (or will happen) and where. You already have a "Contest winners" section, so maybe...

I use the frontpage of RMN to let people know what events are happening and where (on RMN). I also use it to let people know about other neat things, like a new RPG Maker eZine.

Basically, I used to write a triweekly news article, but now instead incorporated the ideas from it into RMN's site design. I am not yet satisfied, and there are things in my SNEWS articles that aren't in the site yet. Like editorials. maybe I could write a regular editorial for this ezine...

I'm keen to write some stuff as well. What is the generalized length in words for an article? And do we have to provide our own images/format? I mean, I think it'd be excellent if you could specify these kinds of things to make it easier for people to post articles. Because right now I'm kind of like, "OK where do I start?"

Edit: For example, specify a short article of, say, 50-150words, and something like medium 150-300w, long 300w-600w or something. So people can have the absolute pleasure of like, an upper/lower limit. Idk, it's just that otherwise I might on the off-chance have a hard time knowing where to start or finish if I don't have the privilege of having a word count to write to/around.

Thanks! :)