The Intel® Game Dev web site was updated in May 2019, to add focus on the game development practitioner. The old site was pretty good at being inclusive of the community, but it was often hard to find the deeply relevant content. Here is a screenshot of the old site:
Figure 1. Intel® Software game development landing page prior to May 16, 2019
It used a large rotating flash banner to showcase a few recent content items. Kind of cool, but also kind of distracting. The “buttons” linking you to the actual content were below the flash banner in a very small font. The Wayback Machine* archive did walk this page the day before the update, conveniently.
To recap the update before I show it, this change:
- Removed the flash banner, made button and font sizes easier to read or find.
- Added highly visible “selection” buttons to route developers to Go Deep or Getting Started pages depending on whether they are an active practitioner or a learner.
- Added a more visible Recent Updates top three that is curated, with a link to a larger collection of Recent Updates, including the top six curated and tools updates.
Both the Go Deep and the Recent Updates content is curated by us, the GAME team.
Here is what the Intel Game Dev home page looks like now:
Figure 2. Intel® Software game development landing page after May 16, 2019
And here is what the Go Deep page looks like:
Figure 3. Intel Go Deep curated content landing page.
Before adding Go Deep; all of the content no matter the source was commingled in one list, including all of:
- our Intel-generated content, that is specifically targeted at current game developer practitioners
- other Intel-generated content, that may or not be specifically targeted at practitioners
- community generated content, that usually is not targeted.
The community content is cool to see what the community is doing, but it is often less directly relevant to actual industry-employed game developers.
For Recent Updates, we carry a top three on the Game Dev Landing Page, with a link to a specific Recent Updates landing page that has the top six developer content items as well as the recent tool updates for tools like VTune™ and Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA):
Figure 4. Intel Recent Updates
This is a significant update in focus and usability.
While we have had some exciting technical information posted recently, I want to cover a few of our foundational pieces of content next.
Then I will start reviewing our recent updates, starting with GDC 2019 and continuing until I catch up.