Developing a game you inevitably face frustrating setbacks that destroy your motivation. Here’s a shout-out to my fellow devs and bloggers who give me the much needed reboot!
- Tom Francis (Pentadact) – a PCGamer journalist that just released his own first game Gunpoint! Congrats Tom, reading (and watching) through your struggles and finally seeing you make the release has helped my motivation a ton!
- Gaslamp Games – developers of Dungeons of Dreadmore and now Clockwork Empires. Love their consistent design and technical updates (just what I need to scratch my nerdy coding itch!)
- Radiator Blog – Robert Young, the author of several narrative, experimental Half Life 2 mods. Lots of interesting design and storytelling retrospective, definitely food for thought.
- GameDev Image of the Day – not so much a blog but gallery of screenshots of various in-dev games (similar to Twitter’s ScreenshotSaturday). Just browsing and looking at others’ accomplishments makes me want to bust out Visual Studio and, well… accomplish!
- Reddit – a conglomeration of the best and the worst the internet has to offer, but if you find the right subreddits it’s great. Highly recommend r/DevBlogs, r/GameDev, r/IndieGaming and r/GamerNews. It also proved a wonderful marketing channel that accounts for most of my traffic and led to Postmortem getting picked up by several gaming sites. Thanks Redditors!
- Extra Credit – great insightful video series analyzing game design and the industry.
- RockLeeSmile – indie game Let’s Play videos, lots of interesting experimental stuff with a good narrator to boot!
- Joost DevBlog – more design and technical thoughts from the dev of Awesomenauts, among others. Initially found it thanks to this excellent Indie Marketing Plan post!
And now, for something completely different…
You can only take so much reading and watching about games, development and industry, so here’s some other non-gaming blogs that nonetheless gave me many great ideas:
- Study Hacks – blog of Cal Newport, a teacher, book author and PhD researcher. Lots of introspection on how to manage your time, maximize your productivity, and survive an overly-busy schedule without dying. Cal, thanks for so many great Hacks!
- International Disabled Nomad – blog of my college friend who, despite suffering muscle atrophy and being wheelchair-bound, has traveled all over the world (helping poor communities and diffussing mines in Afghanistan among other), accomplishing already than I will my whole life. Thanks Megan for showing me that no matter how shitty things are you can always walk (well, roll) one step further!
- Summer Tomato – cooking and nutrition being one of my other hobbies, this foodist’s blog fuels my dietary GameDev needs!
- Michael Ruhlman – a pretty amusing but informative articles on cooking and food industry, complete with some great rants as well!
Sometimes you just need to turn the PC off…
Between coding, marketing, managing, reading, researching and my Web Design job, I do spend the vast majority of my day in front of the screen, which can be overwhelming. So after my productive morning, nothing’s better than turning the computer off and heading out for a relaxing yet re-energizing bicycle ride!
Heck, good half of Postmortem‘s story ideas and design decisions were conceived while vigorously cycling up my neighborhood hills…