Game Developer Magazine: A great resource.

GD: I absolutely love it.

I figured I'd take the time out of my day today to read the magazine I'd decided to evaluate on a lark: Game Developer. I paid I believe $50 to $60 for a year's subscription and it took a little over a month to process, but I got November's issue. This would be the issue whose cover article is Certain Affinity's Age Of Booty. I had previously not heard of this game beforehand and didn't know anything at all about it.

It just so happens that I have recently been re-interested in game development on a serious level and I was re-evaluating Microsoft's XNA Framework. I wanted to make a strategy game (decision is still being held off on whether or not to approach it turn-based or real-time) for the XBox Live Arcade (XBLA) that I've been designing out and want to prototype soon. Well, as I read the first page of the article, and it's source development tools, I soon realized that Certain Affinity had, with a small group of core designers and developers, done exactly what it is that I wanted to do myself, or at least try out. Except they did it with Capcom, a major publisher, as their backer, and their team consisted of experts in the field; veterans, shall we say, of the Game Development Wars that wage ceaselessly. According to GD, they had (in general) 5 full time developers, 9 shared, and 3 part-time contractors to produce 457 source files yielding 117,000 lines of code with only 2,147 bugs reported (either open, resolved or addressed) with a development time of 13 months: 2 months pre-production, 11 months production. They made the XBox 360 version, contracted out the Windows version, and Capcom took on the PS3 version. These are the same people who make Left 4 Dead. This is now a game I'm going to purchase simply to support them. I'll probably have fun and enjoy it quite a bit too, as I'm an RTS fan and I love board games, which this game is inspired from.

Anyways, I wanted to point out that their post-mortem was an excellent resource and covers the essential ideas and processes that I want to implement myself and how I believe the wave of the indie future is going to run for the immediate future.

Anyone who is interested at all in game development should check this magazine out - it's available both online and in print, and I prefer print editions of most resources, but it allows for some serious flexibility if you're on the road a lot and have only your laptop or digitally-enabled mobile phone to accompany you.

Also, an excellent additional resource I enjoyed was their ads. I tend to hate ads in magazines, but the tools they list and the offers they provide were all things I seriously considered - and they tend to be either full page spreads or out of tabbed to the sides or bottoms of pages where they aren't annoying (*cough*websites should do this more and stop inserting weblinks everywhere*cough*) or distract from the main content.

Thanks and I hope you check them out,
Ahad L. Amdani