DevBlog Matsuri

Bruce Everiss, industry Mark Williams lookalike, over at BruceOnGames saw fit to post an article listing some of his favourite game developer blogs, being kindly / uninformed enough to single mine out for special comment. He makes a good point in saying that if one wants to learn more about the game developer's life of the mind, game review sites and magazines are simply inadequate in the face of the rising tide of actual game developer blogs that are cropping up with increasing regularity.

It's true in my case that the blogs I frequent most often are those written by industry people, usually developers, the occasional indie developer with only one or two actual "journalism" sites. For news there is no better place than the industry-only Chaos Engine forum, and for press releases there is the Magic Box. The good thing about developer blogs is that even if they don't actually write about the development of their own titles, which is often protected under Non-Disclosure Agreements, their insights on games is usually of a much higher standard than even the professional game journalists'.

Here is the list as found on BruceOnGames, spellchecked and with my addendums at the bottom:

• Mainly About Games. Informative and well written it has a nice personal feel to it.
• Dopass.com. Short entries not just about gaming. Funny at times.
• A path through possibility. Irregular updating but well worth a read for some incisive commentary.
• Magical Wasteland. Refreshingly irreverent.
• Survival Horror. Does what it says on the tin.
• Gamedev.net. A big and serious site with a lot of good content.
• Seven Degrees of Freedom. Very nice diary style blog.
• Random Encounters in Imaginary Realms. Just cherry picks the good stuff.
• Cheeky. Sparse and interesting development diary.
• Peter Mackay’s projects and development diary. Quake on Gamecube.
• Life In The Rain. Often long interesting personal articles.
• T=Machine. Wide ranging blog with much that is happening at the sharp end online.
• Black Company Studios. Semi diary semi event driven articles. Nice.
• .mischief.mayhem.soap. A serious game developer’s blog.
• JakeWorld Blog. The life of a game developer.
• Gamefeil. Games, comics, diary.
• Scientific Ninja. Technical stuff here.
• Devbump. Aggregation of gaming articles.
• Nimblebit. Game development diary. Lots of technical stuff.
• It’s Bezness time. Bedroom developer diary.
• I love it, I feel like Sisyphus. On start-ups, game development and programming.

Personal favourites not yet listed are:

• The Grumpy Gamer – legend Ron Gilbert's on－line scrapbook and thought diary.
• Make it big in games - Jeff Tunnell and Josh Dallman aiming for the “most insightful and useful blog on the internet” award
• Reality Panic – IGDA head honcho Jason Della Rocca tells up what he’s up to.
• The Pickford Bros. blog – Old-skool development heroes doing new-skool cool stuff.
• Warren Spector’s blog – I’ve never heard of this guy but he has some nice ideas. He should be working in the games industry, if you ask me.

There are many more blogs and sites out there written by actual game developers from all different fields of our industry. I apologise if I’ve left anyone specific off the list, but the average internet user can easily find more of them with a little patience without having to resort to getting all their gaming information from a handful of major game journalist sites.

If you’re a developer with his own spiffy blog but you’re not listed on my blogroll, don’t be shy and drop me a line at japanmanship@gmail.com to inform me of my heinous remiss.