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.
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Wolfire blog is an example of one I already follow. They give many useful insights into the process they go through for the creation of their game, Overgrowth.
Example article: Linear Algebra for Game Programmers
General essays on game design theory. A good example read is an article on visualizing the creative process
All these thoughts and pictures can be summarized in a very short list.
- Brainstorm: Create lots of low cost, real word experiments.
- Cull: Rigorously apply agreed upon culling criteria to weed out the weak ideas and reinvest in your most promising experiments.
- Cycle: Repeat the process until you generate meaningful value.
- Practice: Across multiple projects, practice all stages of the creative process so you constantly improve the myriad of skills involved in brainstorming, culling and cycling.
In depth articles that mostly relate to either networking or physics. Two really good articles are What every programmer needs to know about game networking and fix your timestep.
What we want is the best of both worlds. A fixed delta time value for the simulation plus the ability to render at different framerates. These two things seem completely at odds, and they are – unless we can find a way to decouple the simulation and rendering framerates.
An iPhone game blog. Deals with indie production issues, OpenGL ES problems, iPhone specific features (such as in-app purchasing) and their results, shares sales data, as well as general production issues. A good general article is Prototyping: You're (probably) Doing It Wrong
- Mistake #1: Going With The First Idea
- Mistake #2: Not having a good question
- Mistake #3: Taking too long
- Mistake #4: Building a system, not a game
And don’t ever, ever, use the argument “if we take some extra time and do this the right way, we can reuse it in the game”. EVER.
#AltDevBlogADay - Recently brought to life by Insomniac's Mike Acton and some other guys (/girls?). It's got way more contributors than makes sense listing here.
It covers a wide range of topics, with the only common denominator being Game Development - be it design, programming or management. It's mainly there to encourage all contributors to post more often with one blog being published every day. Most of the contributors are on Twitter and share their credentials, so it should be possible to have some fruitful discussions on certain topics in case someone is interested.
Since it covers a potentially infinitely wide range of topics, singling out a representative one is pretty much impossible.
realtimecollisiondetection.net blog
The blog of Christer Ericson, author of the excellent book Real-Time Collision Detection (who'd have guessed? ;). Equal parts general programming, physics programming, and graphics programming.
Selected reading:
Excellent source of Game Ai information from videos, to interviews, to articles, etc etc. The best content has to be paid for but is worth it since there are a lot of interviews with Game AI developers about techniques that aren't published anywhere else.
On top of that it allows you access to their AI Sandbox application for testing out your own AI implementations.
Tom Forsyth's blog. Predominately graphics programming.
Selected reading:
HobbyGameDev by Chris DeLeon.
This is a great site to learn about the basics, follow cool interesting things about game development and generally learn A LOT. Take a look at the sample games and enjoy the ride!
Design blog that focuses on design aspects of MMORPGs. Is often critical of many elements in most sandbox MMO designs. Instead of pure criticism, the blog does offer up design suggestions and theories on how to improve.
DoubleBuffered by our very own JZig
I am personally a fan of Why Can’t I Jump? The Perils of Player Autonomy, but that might just be because that is one of my biggest pet peeves.
Some great thoughts on level design, pixel art and game design in general. Sometimes she goes off onto a bondage-themed pixel-art tangent though, so don't add this to your RSS list if these things offend you.
Ex-Elixir Studios and Lionhead coder who went indie with his own one-man-band gamedev company, Positech Games.
The blog covers all aspects of working as an Indie, including game design, programming and also the business side of things. For example, this interesting post on the marketing / production tradeoff.
This is the official Tumblr blog of Markus Persson ("Notch"), creator of Minecraft.
There was a time when it had a lot of good content; now most of the posts are about Minecraft (and they're quite frequent), but there are a few gems in there. For example, he occasionally posts a YouTube video of a game I've never seen before, or talks about a Game Dev competition that I find interesting, and occasionally when talking about a problem or accomplishment he will sprinkle bits of code into his posts (i.e. here and there) which I find interesting.
Pete Isensee of the Xbox platform team. Focuses mostly on C++ and Xbox, with some side-steps into leadership.
An exemplary post might be something like API Principles:
[...] If you're developing your own API set, these guidelines can help ensure that your customers have that dreamy experience developers get when using a great API. You'll also spend less time having to update documentation, write complex sample code, or staffing a large support team.
His GDC presentations are all quite solid too.
From the authors of the book. Obviously graphics related generally. One of my favorites.
A blog about game technology development, graphics, and productivity for developers. Some popular posts include:
Updates infrequently.
(Disclosure: This is my own blog.)
Game design. Insightful articles and specific critiques.
Selected reading:
Shawn Hargreaves Blog - Game programming with the XNA Framework
Shawn was the original developer of the Allegro library and is now one of the developers working on XNA at Microsoft. His blog covers loads of stuff about XNA, but also touches on games he's worked on in the past, such as this post about the AI coordinate system in MotoGP
Mischief Mayhem Soap by Maciej is an awesome gamedev-blog: http://msinilo.pl/blog/
He puts a lot of effort into explaining performance, caches, general issues that are commonly overlooked etc. I think it's a "must-read" if you're a game-dev.
iDevBlogADay is a fairly recent initiative to aggregate blogs of a some iPhone developers and bloggers and while usually projects like this one rarely produce good results, right now iDevBlogADay is probably the most interesting blog I read daily. It's not strictly about game development, but iPhone development is like 60% about games, so you won't be disappointed.
And excellent GamesFromWithin blog mentioned above is a part of this initiative.
TigSource has been pretty good for keeping up on indy games I wouldn't normally hear about.
A combined feed with contributions from Gamasutra's experts. Each post is a unique story/perspective on an aspect of game development and business from various people in the industry.
GBGames – Thoughts on Indie Game Development
An Indie Game Developer’s somewhat interesting thoughts
I found this blog while looking for info related to object-oriented/component-based game design. I found this article, and kept reading because this blog is interesting and well-written.
I think I got hooked reading his progress reports from Ludem Dare #15.
More recently, it's been interesting to follow Gianfranco Berardi as he quits his day-job to concentrate on game development full-time.
An awesome blog with well-written, simple to follow tutorials for anyone interested in developing for iOS or using the cocos 2D game development framework.
Successful indie dev Introversion has made many in-depth posts about the development of their newest game, and some other posts about game development in general. Definitely worth checking out, especially if you're interested in procedural generation.
By jeff vogel.
It's less about programming and more about game design and indie game developement in general. his company spiderweb software published several very impressive old school rpgs (turn based combat, lots of text, uh, story).
some recent examples:
Game School Gems
A blog from one of the teachers at a game development school in Sweden. He's worked at Massive Entertainment for 12 years as Senior Software Engineer. Some very interesting stuff! (Spelling could be better ;)
The blog of frictional games, the 5 person development team that created the fantastic Amnesia The Dark Decent.
Frictional Games is a small game company located in the dark depths of Sweden. We have currently developed the Penumbra games series and Amnesia: The Dark Descent.The Dark Descent.
Any aspiring game developer is sure to gather inspiration and hope from these guys and their blogs.
Pierre is not posting very often these days (though his blog is not dead), but you can go through archives and find a lot of interesting information, he was quite a big inspiration for me in years.
