What are good game development/design blogs to follow?
Please one blog per answer (make sure to provide a link) and give a brief summary as to the content of the blog posts.
If you can, pick a single article that shows high value and share a snippet of it.
I have some detailed articles on the Making of Crash Bandicoot at my blog: Game Articles or the first of the Crash series.
Avid gamer (and game developer?) who set up a goal to create a new game idea or gameplay mechanic once per day for 300 days.
Originally, it was a challenge to myself to create a new game idea or gameplay mechanic once per day for 300 days. I failed this challenge and stopped updating daily at entry #050. However, I still occasionally update with new entries as the impulse hits me. I hope to reach the full three hundred one day.
Amit’s Game Programming Information
What’s on this page?
I’m interested in producing complexity out of simple parts. This page contains bookmarks that I collected while working on games; I did not write most of the content linked from here. As a result the set of links here reflects the types of things I needed to know: only a few specific topics (not everything related to game programming), general ideas instead of platform-specific information (graphics, sound, compilers), and ideas and designs instead of source code (I find it easier to go from an idea to code than from code to an idea).
It's written by Soren Johnson who was the lead designer on Civ 4 and involved in the design of Spore. It includes his columns from Game Developer Magazine and is the best game design specific blog that I know of.
Some examples:
This is a prominent indie game dev community, with its own interesting RSS feed!
An indie game company focusing on HTML5 and JavaScript game development.
Some example posts:
I follow this one and it has some good thoughts on using agile methodologies in the game development space. I find it a pretty good read most of the time.
I like to follow the blog from the developers of the excellent Amnesia and Penumbra games: http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/
It contains study articles about games concepts, game industry, some making of and technical thoughts (example). They post once a week in an very good and easy to read English.
There are so many amazing blogs out there already, I felt I needed a place to keep track of the best of the best. Hungry Gamer is blog I do where I link to lots of incredible articles on games and game design with quotes and commentary. I also recently started a video podcast about my own struggles and successes with game design where I document a two-week sprint of work, then go back and see what worked and what didn't. It's 100% for developers, both new and experienced, so I hope you guys will check it out!
I'll also be checking out all of these amazing blogs. Thanks for asking this question! Lots of amazing information here.
Written by Jessica Mulligan from 1997 to 2003, so it's a bit dated now, but it contains excellent content for folks interested in (massively multiplayer) online game design.
That first five minutes of play is a critical time for an online game; the customer will make up his or her mind in that time whether or not to spend money on playing. If there is a sysop present to get new players started, the chances are good that they'll decide to play long term, and pay for the privilege. Or, in the words of online games expert Bridgette Patrovsky, "The first five minutes customers are in your game, they're interviewing you. If you don't make a good first impression, you're unlikely to get the 'job.'"
Especially some of the older posts on there where he explains how he makes some of the various parts of the game work are very interesting.
Dutch browser game developer. Posts about all kind of things in their development process:
Interesting and fun to read!
KWIGBO is pretty good. I'm starting iPhone development using Cocos2D and it's great for that (and more).
Learn & Master Cocos2d Game Development - by Steffen Itterheim
Shameless plug, it's my own website, I hope you don't mind. :)
I offer insights into sales, compare array performance metrics and cocos2d tutorials, links and other learning materials.
Posts articles about the legal side of games -- perhaps more about games than game dev, but probably interesting to some (aspiring) game developers.
Interviews with various indie developers as well as some guest columns musing on random game topics.
The blog of Frictional Games. Creators of Penumbra and Amnesia: the Dark Descent.
Here's an awesome game blog, focused mainly on XNA that I found!
He's got a special section for XNA called XDSK (XNA 4.0 Resources)
I've started writing an Android Game Development Blog, I'm a full-time game developer who has decided to create a game for Android in my spare time. I'll be making weekly posts in about all the new things I learn as I develop my first-ever Android game.
These are some the topics I hope to cover over the next year or so:
Flax.ie is a game development blog, brimming with a passion for programming and technology in general, by two Irish Game Development students, Ciarán McCann and Carl Lange. The blogs current main focus is on the development dairies of the Flax HTML5 Game Engine which we are currently developing.Topics range from web-based technology like GWT and HTML5 (+CSS+Javascript) to C++, OpenGL, Java, PHP and Game development for Windows Phone 7.
There is GameFromScratch.com which is primarily about creating a video game from scratch favouring freely available tools where possible. There are also various posts on game dev in general but generally are targeted towards complete beginners.
Games By Design - Christopher Park (Arcen Games)
Most of the content is related to the development of his games, AI War and A Valley Without Wind, but there is some general game design commentary also. He has a fascinating series of articles where he discusses the design behind the unique AI of AI War, which even if you haven't played the game is a good read for anyone interested in AI.
Toucharcade.com has some good posts on new iPhone game development. This gives you some idea on what is relevant in the industry today and what games are popular.
I am currently keeping a blog about the Android game I am working on. The game is in a very early stage and I consider myself a novice developer (the game is only my second real game), but I keep up with it regularly. Also contributing is the second half of my two-man team, the artist. We're keeping the blog mostly as a learning experience for ourserlves, but if you are interested, you can follow it at rawdev.tumblr.com. We always welcome any feedback as well!
While I have over 30 gamedev blogs in my Google Reader (some of them already mentioned), this one stands out. Tadhg Kelly is a really brilliant game designer, and his posts are always interesting and thought-provoking.
Blog posts that I've written as solutions to problems or information and ideas you might want to take on board. I started it as a project to keep the tips and tricks that I felt were commonly asked by the games developers I worked with, and it's somewhat slowed down as I don't work with such large teams of juniors any more. I still post whenever there's something I notice going on that has been caused by misunderstandings or when people turn out to be completely oblivious to the solutions that have worked for me in the past.
