Hello, readers! If you came to this article via our front page, you will have noticed some changes to our layout that are meant to better highlight our best stories, and keep you up to date with the latest news and analysis.
The most obvious change is at the top of the website. Here's the place where we curate and highlight the day's most relevant content, whether it's a blog from our community, original journalism from our staff or contributors, or breaking news.
You'll notice that we do not have a section called "features" anymore, but that doesn't mean that we're abandoning in-depth tutorials, interviews and long-form journalism. We've had a lot of internal discussion about the buckets "news" and "features," which have been staple sections on Gamasutra for years. But you may have noticed that a lot of the stories we run in our "news" section these days aren't really "news" updates at all, but simply single-page versions of what you might call "features," including design analyses, cultural commentary, tutorials, interviews and so on.
So it started to become clear that a "feature," a lot of times, just meant "a long, multi-page article" (often, these articles would come from our community of developers, much like blogs do today). Don't worry, we'll still be publishing longer-form pieces from our journalists and bloggers. We just won't be calling them "features," as the word became increasingly meaningless. (You'll still be able to access past feature articles here, along with new stories that use a multi-page format.)
Under our top stories, we've adjusted our feed so that it's more blog-like. It updates reverse-chronologically, so our newest stories are at the top, making it easier to come back to Gamasutra and see what our latest stories are. (Stories in the main column had all been manually-positioned, previously.) You can see all of our updates here, including the best blog content.
We'll continue to have a Featured Blogs section on the front page as well, under the "From the Community" module. We've also made our job section more prominent, and added a more prominent call for developer blogs on the front page. Additionally, if you visit our site on a smartphone, you'll see our front page is now adaptive, for more mobile-friendly browsing. Our web dev team is currently working on making mobile versions of our article pages as well.
We still have more intensive design work that we are preparing for, but hopefully this facelift proves to be a bit friendlier in the meantime. Aside from the redesign, I also hope that our stronger focus on developer blogs helps connect you with your peers more effectively, in a way that helps you make better video games. I feel that we've been seeing some improvement in blog quality, and we've been getting some positive feedback (along with helpful criticism, too). There have definitely been a few comment threads that have had a "hallways of GDC" type of feel, which is pretty cool.
And speaking of feedback, we're happy to hear it. You can email me at [email protected], or our blog director Christian Nutt at [email protected]. You can also reply in the comments below.
Sincere thanks to everyone who reads us!
Kris Graft, EIC, Gamasutra
Twitter: @krisgraft