Best place to put a RL dev site?

[XLambda]

Hi, everyone!

I was wondering what the best place for a dev site is. Basically, I've been doing some work on my pet project - although it's still far from a releasable state right now - and thought about putting a little dev site up at a later date. Is it better to put the development details on a blog or WP site and the actual files on a file hoster? Or would it be better to get some webspace and put everything into that one?  What do you recommend?

(note: wasn't sure where to post this. if misplaced, please relocate.)

[Z]

I think a website is a great way to have a neatly organized place about your game. However, having a blog allows you to post your updates easily, and allows players to comment on these updates (I guess some people would be more likely to comment on a blog post, rather than to register on e.g. RogueTemple forums to comment on announcements, or contact you via e-mail, which is a bit worse because it does not create a public community in any way). So, I recommend to have both.

[corremn]

Blog is easiest to put updates of what you are working on, and to keep motivation up and you can receive direct player feedback. You can put direct links to file hosting sites for binaries and screen shots.

Something like google code or SourceForge (google code is simpler and easier) are good project sites. They can handle code (in a repository) or just host binaries, screenshots etc in a much better layout than a file server (with added statistics).

My suggestion is get a blogger account and link that to a google-code site. Cheers.

E.g Blog: corremn.blogspot.com/
Google code: code.google.com/p/ioc/

[Darren Grey]

A relatively easy thing to do is have a blog and keep your files on a free hosting site like Google Sites.  Only link people to the blog and have your files directly linked to from there.  It's free and simple to set up, and it's a format that everyone is used to.  An alternative if you don't care about the blog is to use Google Code.

[Kyzrati]

As someone who's tried both approaches (website and blog) on different projects, I'd have to say that a blog is much easier to set up and get feedback through, if that's what you're looking for. After comparing lots of blogging sites out there, blogger seems to be a great choice--just set up on there recently myself, and there seem to be a fair number of RL-related devs going that route lately.

[Krice]

Blogs itself aren't usually that interesting, unless talking about JADE or some other major project. I think dev blogs are more like showing the author himself that something has been done, well at least a new pointless blog entry once a while...

The game's homepage should be something to spend time and make it good looking and easy information about the game itself. If I see a spartan looking dev blog with a link to some file host I'm not going to download the game, because I know it sucks.

[Kyzrati]

Blogs itself aren't usually that interesting, unless talking about JADE or some other major project.

Funny you should say this immediately after setting up a new dev blog 
Not for a game, I admit, but funny. (Brick Atelier looks pretty cool btw--always looking for a new pixel editor that's actually useful. I've tried so many and always end up back with photoshop, which is obviously not made for it, but it's what I'm most familiar with.)

[alakra]

These are all decent suggestions, but since you mentioned that this is a "dev" site, I'm wondering why not use something like github.com to do hosting for your project rather than google code because of the critical mass of collaborating developers that github seems to have over google code. 

Github also has the ability to host a blog through github pages (and files up to your storage limit). Granted, it's definitely not as easy as wordpress or blogger, but you get distributed version control code hosting through git, an easy way to track issues/milestones and a wiki for any manuals or notes you want to provide.  Google code does this, but it Github offers, I personally  believe, a strong "dev" community.  Also the ability for other developers to start hacking alongside you is really empowering for your project.

If you checkout www.hacknite.com, you will see a Jekyll blog that I host on github.com and you can see it's repository structure at  https://github.com/hacknite/hacknite.github.com.  This should give you an idea of how it works.

Ultimately, you should choose what best fits your goals, but I thought  you might need some more input that just blogger and google code.

Best of luck on your project,

    fozze