Praxis

There's a bit of story behind this, but I'll try to make it brief. I'm part of a small group of individuals, mostly students, running a web site, http://www.nintendoplayers.com/. The site is entirely custom-coded in PHP. We had decent viewership, established press contact with a lot of the major gaming companies, get free games from companies like Capcom and Hudson Entertainment, go to press events like E3, etc. It's essentially a Nintendo gaming/news/rumors/community site.

We wrote the site in PHP, with the original intention of expanding it heavily with community features later on, but just creating it a news site initially and plugging in a PHPBB forum in the back. We created user accounts for the main site, so users can create accounts and comment on articles, with the intention of eventually building our own forum using the same accounts and letting users have their own blogs and profiles, etc.

We also built up a games database. Over 5000 games manually entered, along with their developer, publisher, release date, supported peripherals, number of players, etc. Some games have box arts, and we intend to eventually have box arts on almost everything. Every game released on the NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Game Boy, and Virtual Boy is in that database, along with most DS, Wii, and GameBoy Advance games. However, outside of a search and reviews system, we don't have anything actually using this database.

However, the guy who was coding the site is moving on with graduation and marriage. We've been reassessing our mistakes with the site and we realized we weren't really offering much that other generic sites weren't, and we want to capitalize on our strengths.


What we're looking for is someone who would be interested in partnering on this. We're handling all of the press side of things but none of the remaining staff members has enough coding experience. We want to build the site into a large community site, with user profiles and blogs (think Facebook for Nintendo), perhaps web apps using the games database, and innovative new features that other sites don't have yet. I don't care whether we stick with more custom-coded stuff or switch to a CMS and start coding custom addons to it, as long as we keep our games database as there's a lot of work put into that.

We're all students and we realize there's a lot of work involved in this. Sadly, we can't really offer payment, but the intention is for the site to become profitable (right now it's only paying for itself), and the promise would be that if the site can be built into a profitable web site you would be considered a partner and get a sizable split with the rest of us.


Is anyone out here interested in embarking on such a project? I realize that this will not appeal to the majority here who are looking for simple jobs for a guaranteed profit, and this is hardly a guarantee. But if anyone would love to challenge themselves and take a shot at seeing if they can help build something neat, this could really turn out to be something cool. And you'll definitely learn some things about the industry and perhaps get some good contacts out of it if you're interested in entering the gaming industry. We'll try to get you into press events like E3 if you'd like

Even if you're not interested yourself, if you have any suggestions for our predicament please let me know, and if you know anyone who might be interested in such a project, please let them know. Thanks!

Praxis

Anyone who is interested may email me at chardin ( at ) nintendoplayers.com, or just reply here or send me a PM.

Apophis

I know php, mysql, html and a bit of javascript but i dunno how much use i would be.
I am interested in helping out though.