Al's Game Programming Blog

I discovered this games industry blog. In addition to being interesting in its own right, it is also cool because it links to lots of other industry blogs.

One thing I notice is very few of my fellow game developer bloggers are programmers. Well, I am going to do my best to change that! Expect more posts on the technical aspects of games development in the future.

I also need to think about why programmers are not blogging as much as those in other disciplines. It doesn't seem healthy. We need to communicate with each other more. Of course, blogging is just one way of communicating ideas.

For example, there are some excellent games programming mailing lists. But unfortunately these can get quite competitive and often degenerate into "I'm smarter", "No you're wrong, I'm smarter" type exchanges.

There are the annual games development conferences like GDC. These are great for one-way communication where the speaker is (hopefully) very knowledgeable about a certain subject and can perhaps impart some useful information to those of us attending the conference. There isn't usually very much ad-hoc peer-to-peer communication though, between programmers at least.

I can highly recommend visiting Brian Hook's site. It isn't strictly speaking a blog but I think it serves a similar purpose. Brian programs games but I am not sure if he would appreciate being categorized as a "games programmer". He's more of a renaissance man I think :)