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Writers Guidelines
Features
The
audience for your technical article will include professional programmers,
animators, sound designers, and producers. We do not target the hobby or
amateur game development market.
Gamasutra and Game Developer welcome submissions on programming, design
theory, 3D design, sound design, testing, and asset management, among other
topics. Articles should be of a "how-to" nature. Our focus is on implementing
solutions, using concrete examples from game development projects. Our readers
want advice and recommendations about tools and technology. Include as many
real-world examples within your article as possible to illustrate concepts.
Subjects We Cover
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 don'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 have real code. 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
assembly language are the most important languages for Game Developer.
It does not mean we are exclusive to them, though, or that we have any
concrete ratio of C++ to Java to ASM that we stick to. Multiplayer/Internet
game development, real-time 3D graphics, and artificial intelligence
are examples of programming articles we have run in the past.
- Animation
and 3D modeling.Creating real-time and prerendered animation, character
animation, mesh deformation, reducing polygon counts, modeling objects,
motion capture, creating realistic textures... 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. Design
topics are often too esoteric to engage a reader for 2000 words, but
if you think that you have a fantastic idea about game design, we'd
like to know about it. The more specific you can be in your article,
the better. We're not interested in articles with titles like "What
Makes A Game Fun"; an article titled "Multiplayer Game Interface Design"
or "Designing a Flexible Field of View" would be of much more interest
to us.
- Audio.
Although it sometimes gets the short shrift in games, people realize
the importance of a well crafted audio track. We want to publish articles
that explain what it takes to compose great music, creating sound effects,
edit and manipulate game audio, and put it all together using flourishes
like 3D audio.
- Business
topics. Game Developer devotes some amount of space to business issues,
especially channel, legal, and marketing issues. Articles of interest
here could deal with, for instance, breaking into the channel, legal
protection when working with a distribution house, and marketing. Of
much more interest to us are articles on industry trends based on real
numbers.
Article
Formatting
Features
vary in length depending on the subject matter. We reformat all articles during
the production phase, so you should not worry about page layout. However,
here are some tips to give your articles a professional appearance:
- Your
introduction should introduce the topic, state why the subject is important,
explain what you will teach the reader, and explain why you are a good
person to teach the reader (your experience/credentials as it relates
to the topic).
- Use
short paragraphs.
- Use
only one level of subhead. Although you may (and probably should) use
more than one level of subhead for your own outline, when you turn this
into an article you need to write transitions.
- Send
as much relevant artwork to support your article as possible, but do
not embed these screen shots or artwork in your article. Send artwork
as separate files.
- Provide
captions for the artwork or tables, and remember that captions should
not repeat what was stated in the article.
- Listings
and figures need to be referenced in the text. You always have to use
a phrase along the lines of "Because, as can be seen in Figure 3, the
viewpoint has moved, we must transform the Foo matrix, as shown in Listing
1."
- Your
conclusion should reiterate the important points made in the article,
and address what further work needs to be done in the area you have
written about -- i.e., acknowledge related topics that you have not
covered.
- Include
a "For Further Information" section at the end of your article for readers
who want to find more information on the topic of your article. This
could include books and web sites.
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