After publishing my first real Android game thanks to May's theme (somebody pointed out that Android isn't a theme, okay, let's call these monthly motivators then), it's time to start addressing one of my other goals for this year: tutorials!

One of the main inspirations behind this site is to help novice programmers learn more about game development, and that means I need to build up the tutorial section of the site. To help me focus on that, I'm going to gear the introductory tutorials towards making a simple game (probably pong). I'm hoping this helps establish some momentum- it is *really* hard to write tutorials for basic programming concepts, and I think it'll be easier to write more advanced tutorials once I get past the basics.

I want to build up the tutorials not only to help novices learn (how to get started developing simple games is one of the most commonly asked questions in the few Java forums I visit), but also to help get some real visitors to the site playing the games that are already here. I'm imagining a novice programmer googling something like "basic Java game programming tutorials" and finding our site, reading the tutorials, playing your games, checking out their source code, and eventually contributing games of their own. That's been my whole vision since starting the site. We have (thanks to you) built up a pretty solid base of games and example code. Now it's my job to write some tutorials to get the ball rolling.

You can help!

You can help establish some tutorials AND get your games more google traffic! Write a game blog (by going to the game's page and clicking the "New Blog" button on the left) explaining some of the basic programming concepts it uses!

The concepts don't have to be very difficult (in fact, tutorials on simple things like if statements and for loops would be great), and the blog posts don't have to be very long (some code and an explanation that a novice could follow), but just explaining a concept in your own words will go a long way to helping out a novice programmer as well as helping get you some google traffic.

You don't have to explain every detail of your game. Just a simple explanation of how you used a specific programming concept in your game is perfect. For example, "this is what a for loop is, this is how I used a for loop to move all the blocks at once during this part of the game, and here is a code snippet of the for loop in action" would be fantastic.  Tutorials don't necessarily have to be linked to a game, so go nuts! Or instead of writing a tutorial about an existing game, you could do what I'm doing and create a new simple game for the purpose of demonstrating some concepts- if people like your tutorial, they're more likely to check out your other games. You can use the Java or Processing tutorials as an inspiration, or just explain things in your own words. Talk about something basic like how to draw a colored circle in Processing, or something more advanced like how to use libraries like minim or LWJGL. Write a tutorial about displaying images, or about a novel approach you took to solve a problem. The more tutorials we have, the more visitors we'll get, the more people will play our games- everybody wins!

If people are interested in writing tutorial blogs, I'm hoping to implement a feature where I can promote blogs to "official" tutorials. That'll be more important later this summer when I implement cooler user pages and maybe an achievement system, but for now, you'll have the satisfaction of helping the site, helping novice programmers learn, and helping yourself get more people playing your games!

If you do decide to write a tutorial blog about one (or more!) of your games, tag your game with "tutorial" and it'll be listed on the front page all month, and I'll share it incessantly on twitter and facebook!

Edit- I didn't try this, but this month's One Game a Month theme is EDUCATIONAL, which matches this perfectly. What a great excuse to make a game/tutorial pair!