Game Developer magazine is the premier publication for working (and aspiring) video game creators, and reaches over 35,000 industry professionals monthly. Each month, industry leaders and experts share technical solutions, review new game development tools, and discuss strategies for creating innovative, successful video games. Our monthly postmortems dissect the industry’s leading games, from AAA console to social and mobile games and beyond, and our columns give insight into deeper development practices from across all disciplines, from design, to programming, to art, to business, and audio.

Contents

The magazine contains articles on professional game development

Game development

Game development is the software development process by which a video game is developed. Development is undertaken by a game developer, which may range from a single person to a large business. Mainstream games are normally funded by a publisher and take several years to develop. Indie games can...

 topics relating to programming, art, audio, quality control

Quality control

Quality control, or QC for short, is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production. This approach places an emphasis on three aspects:...

, design

Game design

Game design, a subset of game development, is the process of designing the content and rules of a game in the pre-production stage and design of gameplay, environment, storyline, and characters during production stage. The term is also used to describe both the game design embodied in a game as...

, and production. Monthly columns from industry veterans offer in depth discussion on a variety of topics. It has articles by notable game industry figures and reviews on game development

Game development

Game development is the software development process by which a video game is developed. Development is undertaken by a game developer, which may range from a single person to a large business. Mainstream games are normally funded by a publisher and take several years to develop. Indie games can...

 related book

Book

A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...

s, tools, and software packages. The back page "Soapbox" was also a popular feature, which moved to sister site to Gamasutra circa 2004. It was replaced by a splash art page called "Thousand Words," and then replaced again with a regular column "Arrested Development."

Game Developers most popular feature is probably its monthly "Postmortem" column which discusses the recent development of a computer or video game with the top five each of "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong". It provides a frank, first-hand account of the lessons learned in the development process. The first Postmortem was featured in October 1997 and written by Andre Vrignaud on Dark Sun Online.

Game Developer has been recognizing exceptional game development tools with their "Front Line Awards" annually since 1998. Past winners include software (such as Photoshop and VTune), game engine

Game engine

A game engine is a system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and personal computers...

s (Unreal engine

Unreal Engine

The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first illustrated in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, MMORPGs and RPGs...

), hardware (GeForce 3), and books (Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice is a textbook written by James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven K. Feiner and John Hughes and published by Addison–Wesley....

).

Gamasutra

Gamasutra

Gamasutra is a website founded in 1997 for video game developers. It is owned and operated by UBM TechWeb , a division of United Business Media, and acts as the online sister publication to the print magazine Game Developer...

, the sister publication web site of Game Developer, acts as an online resource for game developers, as well as a job posting board for employment in the game development

Game development

Game development is the software development process by which a video game is developed. Development is undertaken by a game developer, which may range from a single person to a large business. Mainstream games are normally funded by a publisher and take several years to develop. Indie games can...

 field.

See also

• Video game developer
  Video game developer
  A video game developer is a software developer that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game console, such as Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, or may develop for a variety of systems, including personal computers.Most developers also...
  
  
• Video game publisher
  Video game publisher
  A video game publisher is a company that publishes video games that they have either developed internally or have had developed by a video game developer....
  
  
• Game programmer
  Game programmer
  A game programmer is a software engineer, programmer, or computer scientist who primarily develops codebase for video games or related software, such as game development tools. Game programming has many specialized disciplines all of which fall under the umbrella term of "game programmer"...
  
  
• Game designer
• Game producer
  Game producer
  A video game producer is the person in charge of overseeing development of a video game.The earliest documented use of the term producer in games was by Trip Hawkins, who established the position when he founded Electronic Arts in 1982...
  
  

External links

• Game Developer Magazine official site
• Request form for the free version of the print edition (for qualified game professionals in the USA only)
• Front Line Awards official site
• Gamasutra.com