TheGameDeveloperMagazine
June/July 2013 F
Ascension
EATURES
God of War: by Whitney Wade and
Chacko Sonny
Find out how Sony Santa
Monica managed to make a proper follow-up to God of
War 3—and designed a multiplayer mode worthy of the franchise.
Postmortem:
Developer Magazine
Game
by Brandon Sheffield
At long last, we get to taste our own medicine! Game
Developer’s longest-running editor-in-chief Brandon
Sheffield explains what went right and wrong with the magazine you’re reading now.
Top 30 Developers of All
Time
by Staff
It’s time for another yearly installment of our Top 30
Developers list. This time, however, we’re calling out our top 30 game developers of all time.
Dirty Game Dev Tricks
by Staff
You know those ugly lastminute hacks and workarounds that you bring out at the last minute to make your milestone deadline? Everyone’s got them, and we asked you to share your favorites.
DEPARTMENTS/COLUMNS
Game Plan
By Patrick
Requiem for a Zine
Mille
Heads
By
Up Display
Staff
GDMixtape and Goodbye,
Game Developer
Educated
By Alexandra
Play
Hall
Tales from the Minus Lab
Good Job!
By Patrick Miller
Interview with Frank Cifaldi
Tool Box
By Mike de la Flor
Monoprice Graphics
Drawing Tabl
The Inner Product
By Mike Acton
Inner Product, Reviewed
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Author: Soriano, Joreil

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Your work will be read and recognized by 35,000 of your peers! Game Developer magazine is by game developers, for game developers. We're always looking for articles that demonstrate new techniques, or espouse new theories, and we welcome your submissions. We are primarily interested in three types of articles: Features,
Postmortems, and Product
Reviews. Check out the subjects we cover, our guidelines, and submit your idea today. Send an email to editors@gdmag.com for more information.
Author: Soriano, Joreil
We want to let you come up with innovative article ideas without influencing you unduly.
Technology and consumer tastes evolve more rapidly than this page gets updated, so we won’t try to list specific topics. In general terms, however, know that we cover the following areas:
PROGRAMMING
Technical issues of interest to game programmers that talk about efficiency, and come with code listings and illustrations.
The writing's got to be coherent, the code's got to be worthwhile, and there has to be enough text to "wrap around the code"; (at least a 10:1 ratio of words to lines of code!). C/C++ and scripting languages are the most relevant for Game Developer.
ANIMATION
MODELING
AND 3D
Creating prerendered real-time and animation, character animation, mesh deformation, procedural world generation, et cetera... Tell us about your tools and techniques.
GAME DESIGN
Good articles on game design are hard to come by. The article has to present concrete, real-world information to be of value. Case studies work well, as do proven theories coupled with actionable diagrams. Examples might include a survey of enemy patterns across various games, application of psychological studies, and actionable tuning techniques.
FEATURE ARTICLES
Features are generally technical, on subjects ranging from programming, design, project management, art/animation, quality assurance, sound, and so on. Our focus is on implementing solutions, using concrete examples from game development projects. If the subject is forward-looking, or elucidates best practices that are often ignored, that's likely to be of interest to us.
Style Guide
How to Submit a Feature
Proposal
Article Formatting
POSTMORTEMS
A postmortem is a look at a recently finished game, written by its leads. Like an in-studio postmortem, you talk about the game and team’s initial goals, and explain what went right and wrong during the development and roll out of the game. The articles tend to be about 3,500 words in length, with plenty of art to supplement it.

TheGameDeveloperMagazine
What's a Postmortem?
Postmortem Pros & Cons
Postmortem Examples
How to Approach a Review
What's Included in a Review
Product Review Examples
PRODUCT REVIEWS
Game Developer reviews game development tools on a regular basis. We do not review games.
Product reviews are intended to help our readers (including programmers, artists, animators, game designers, sound engineers, producers, and quality assurance personnel) make a purchase decision. For that reason it's important not just to tell what features the product has and what it can do, but how well (or not so well) it performs its tasks.
Inject opinion into your reviews.
Reviews should not read like the product's user manual. If it is a programming tool, write to an audience of programmers. If it's a 3D animation tool, pretend that you're writing to nobody else but animators. The length of product reviews is approximately
1,200 words.
Most of our authors are working professionals, but we do offer an honorarium for completion of articles (naturally the greatest reward is seeing your work in print!). Features pay authors a flat rate to be agreed upon before publication, depending on the publishable length of the article, and various other factors. We will send contracts to this effect.
Submit an Idea
Author: Soriano, Joreil
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