Unless you can *really* add value, it doesn't often behoove you to fragment the community -- for one, communities like this one and other forums are about the people--not the platform. You'll spend a great deal of time reinventing the wheel, but how will you attract a strong community to turn it? This is exactly why there aren't a million tiny FaceBooks strewn across the internet--in the end, FaceBook is successful because its where your friends are. It has *gravity* by virtue of its sheer mass. Myspace is a ghetto, Microsoft's offering was still-born, Google is showing some success, but they're throwing massive resources at Google+, and have the consumer clout and exposure to be able to push it. In short, just because you build it, doesn't mean they'll come.

Ruling your own castle is an attractive proposition, but the more productive approach is to focus on improving the kingdom as a whole. Find a strong community to act as the base, and then form a peer group from it's members that are interested in what you're doing, rather than trying to spring a community anew. It would be nice if this site and others had the ability to host small groups within the community at large, but I don't believe the software is capable. If you do form any outside web presence for your group, don't duplicate functionality offered in your home community -- forums, member profiles, etc -- just organize and promote the interests of your group: focus on being a resource, not a community.

Thanks. I guess I will just abandon that idea.

What if a new section on the forums was made so we could socialize?

I don't run this show, but I would suppose that if you showed sufficient participation and a strong membership, along with having specific needs that aren't met by other forums, then the leadership would probably be willing to consider it.

However, keep in mind this idea of fragmentation -- what fragmentation really is is that certain communities make themselves so specific that very few people are interested in participating in them (even if the handful of insiders are very involved) -- because of this, the visibility of the community suffers, and perhaps worse, those inside the community aren't contributing to the community at large. This leads to a lot of duplication of resources and ideas, and at the same time is a wall between the two groups. This reasoning, along with some forums having low traffic in general, led several of the old forums to be cast off or combined with others when this site switched over to new software a few months back.

I'l repeat again -- you don't have to give up on the core of what you were trying to accomplish, you just have to realize that the implementation that first came to mind has a lot of drawbacks. If you focus on being a resource for the particular community that you want to serve, rather than being a community, you can accomplish the same thing, with less effort, while benefitting and benefitting from the larger community. I think you could accomplish that by setting up a website whose purpose is to connect young game developers with other young game developers, and to forums and educational resources across the internet as a starting point. As you grow, you could then start to look at whether you should start filling in what doesn't exist, or producing tailored resources for your community, or perhaps start engaging with existing communities to see if they'd be willing to host your community with things like special forums.

I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you are saying. Do you mean that the site would point to forums and educational material to get the individual started (there's enough of those "I'm 15 where to start" posts on this forum) as well as a system for encouraging social interaction with other youth?

You can do whatever you like. If I were to do it, I would have:

A website:
-It doesn't need to be fancy.
-A statement of who your group serves, and what it intends to do for those people.
-A means of providing community news. Any number of blog systems would be good for this.
-A list of educational resources, perhaps with community ratings.
-A list of forums where your members frequent.
-A list of members, by their forum handles, organized by what forums they frequent (obviously, this would be opt-in).
-A mailing list.

Oh, brilliant! I especially like the idea of the mailing list. That way we could stage our own little competitions easily (as well as spread the news on other game dev. competitions). Do you think that the list of educational resources could be something like this:
>They click on "Getting Started"
>A passage is here explaining the drug that is game development as well as a summary of each of the three categories.
>Three categories of Art, Music/Sound, and Programming/Tech.
>They click on (for example)Programming
>A passage is here explaining how there are two basic primary ways to do the games, which are using specific, non-text-based tools or using a programming language
>They click on Programming Language
>A passage explains how there are many languages that (in the end) do the same thing. It tells of a few popular languages including Python, C# (those first two are recommended), Java, and (recommended against for beginners) C++.
>They click on Python
>A passage explains a little about the start of Python and shares a tiny bit of syntax to show what it's going to look like,
>Here are 3 links: beginner Python, intermediate Python, and advanced Python. Beginner mostly covers the actual language and using libraries like Pygame and PySFML etc. Not too much game-specific programming tutorials are here as few tutorials online teach the language while also teaching game programming techniques. Intermediate Python contains a lot of game programming topics such as collision detection, basic tilemaps, basic structure of games in code, physics, etc. Advanced Python would probably be a tougher one to find tutorials for. It might have tutorials for optimization of game code, binary file systems, or even traversing the gap from Python to a language like Java or C++.
That's how I might structure the basic getting started section of the website. Does that sound good, or is there another gap in my logic?