Some great game development blogs

Most of the knowledge available to keen gamers about the gaming industry can be of a pretty low quality. This is because that knowledge is third or fourth hand. As a very minimum it has been “spun” by a marketing department (I have done loads of this) and then “interpreted” by a journalist. But there is a way round this, keen enthusiasts can get their knowledge directly from the horses mouth, if they read the right blogs.

Whilst there aren’t many blogs from the publishing side of the video game industry there a quite a few from the development side. And they are excellent. These are the guys who actually make the games that everyone plays, so they know what they are talking about. And when they analyse a game they do so with an authority no magazine could match. These guys are the complete opposite of the fanboy, they are intelligent, informed and incisive. There are quite a few in my blogroll but here are a random selection:

• 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.
• Japanmanship. An incredibly good read of a Western developer’s life in Japan.
• Magical Wasteland. Refreshingly irreverant.
• 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.
• 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.
• Bruceongames. Game industry from the publishing perspective.

For anyone with any interest in games the above blogs are just pure gold. Japanmanship, for instance is written by a game developer who works for a Japenese games company, lives in Japan and speaks Japanese. If you want to understand the game industry in Japan there is no finer source of knowledge. It amazes me when fanboys with a millionth of his knowledge and experience argue with him on forums.

Note to bloggers, journalists etc, feel free to copy and paste the above list or even the whole article to anywhere you want.