What Game Developer Blogs Should I Read?

July 30, 2017 9:16 AM

I'm a game writer. I want to read blogs by insightful fellow developers that talk about their craft. What goes into the decisions they're making? And what do they learn from the games they play?
posted by musofire to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

Ultima Ratio Regnum is a roguelike-in-development, but the type of game is far exceeded by the insights and commentary by the developer, who's an academic. Really interesting reading about his goals vs implementation, failures and successes.
posted by Bourbonesque at 9:29 AM on July 30, 2017

Game Maker's Toolkit(youtube channel) is from a games journalist, but Mark Brown is REALLY good at what he does. His videos are insightful and well produced.
posted by deadwater at 9:38 AM on July 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Robert "Radiator" Yang (warning: frequently NSFW as his games tend to be gay sex games). He's really smart & insightful, and is a game dev professor. He does level design walk-through and commentary on his Twitch stream, currently doing Half-Life 2.

Rami Ismail.

Alexis Kennedy. Founder of Failbetter games (Fallen London, Sunless Sea, etc.), left the company to go (even more) independent.
posted by flibbertigibbet at 10:12 AM on July 30, 2017

Alex Brazie's blog talks a lot about what went into designing certain boss encounters in WoW. I think it would be most interesting if you've played WoW.
posted by shesbookish at 11:02 AM on July 30, 2017

You’ve presumably mined out the developer commentaries and retrospectives on Gamasutra?
posted by pharm at 12:51 PM on July 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Emily Short.
posted by paduasoy at 3:26 PM on July 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Mark Rosewater's blog on MTG development is frequently quoted for game design mechanics, eg one of his most famous posts, all the way from 2002, why do bad cards exist?.

While it's for card games and not necessarily computer games many of the mechanics are equally applicable, I haven't played MTG for 15 years but I still enjoy his weekly design blog.
posted by xdvesper at 6:37 PM on July 30, 2017

Best answer: Rockpapershotgun has a series called The Mechanic where Alex Wiltshire and various developers go into great detail about game design.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 3:32 AM on July 31, 2017