Are you a bad enough dev to help 
Game Developer?
Hello, world! Starting with the November issue, I'll officially be taking over the Game Plan editorial (and the rest of the magazine) while editor emeritus Brandon Sheffield jumps headfirst into the deep end of game development. (You can still find him in the mag in his new column called Insert Credit, where he'll continue to opine on all things dev-related.)
By Patrick Miller
Game Developer? Hello, world! Starting with the November issue, I'll officially be taking over the Game Plan editorial (and the rest of the magazine) while editor emeritus Brandon Sheffield jumps headfirst into the deep end of game development. (You can still find him in the mag in his new column called Insert Credit, where he'll continue to opine on all things dev-related.)
By Patrick Miller
-this article was originally published in the November issue of Game Developer
GDMag: The Game
Brandon usually used this editorial page for hard-hitting and insightful opinions and commentary on issues and trends in the game industry--which is a tradition I hope to continue--but for this issue I'm going to do something different. I'm going to describe a bit of the process of making a magazine in game development terms, and I'm hoping you'll be able to help us out with it so that we can help you make better games by giving you a better magazine.
At first glance, the process of making a magazine doesn't really look much like the process of making a game--but you'd be surprised how much they can have in common. Games have artists, producers, designers, and testers; we have a small staff that covers the bases (you can see who does what on the masthead to the right of this column). Games often have miserable crunch times for weeks or months before a major development milestone; magazines often have a miserable week every month while we scramble to get everything edited, laid out, and approved in time for our monthly ship date. We may have more in common than you might think!
Magazines as a platform
As a publishing platform for Game Developer, magazines are reliable and consistent enough, although we miss out on a few major features compared to web and mobile-focused publishing platforms. With magazines, we don't have to worry about maxing out your bandwidth or killing your battery life, and we've got our production process down pat. (If you are reading this on our digital edition: Thanks! We're still trying to make it better, and we should have some new announcements on that front soon.)
On the other hand, magazines also give us a few major problems that game devs can sympathize with. First off, we have discoverability issues within the magazine--it's hard to surface each issue's excellent lineup. Outside of the GDMag loyalists who read every issue from cover to cover, we know you guys read the front page, the back page, and the postmortem, but it gets fuzzy after that. Now, we know that most GDMag readers have to wear a lot of developer hats--even if you're primarily a coder, you may need to know a bit about other dev disciplines too--but it's hard to surface all that stuff with only a table of contents and a few small cover lines. You can't really share articles with your friends online, either, so we can't really count on our magazine stuff going viral.
Related to the discoverability problem is an analytics problem--it's not easy to tell what you guys are reading! Print magazines don't really support JavaScript, so we can't track page views or social networking shares or anything like that. And considering our options for reader engagement are rather limited--paper doesn't have any ways to embed apps or plug in with other APIs--the readership statistics we do get aren't easily correlated to what we did in any given issue of the magazine in the first place.
Finally, we have something of a content pipeline problem--we have to outsource most of our content development. After all, pretty much everyone who is good enough at making games to merit publishing in Game Developer is, well, making games, not working as a full-time magazine freelancer. We rely on a wonderful network of expert developers to help us fill our pages every month, but once you've written one or two articles about a game you've been working on for the last two years, we can't really ask you to write a third, so we have to wait for you to make a new game and write about that. As a result, we're constantly on the hunt for more people to tell us about the problems they've solved and the things they've built.
How you can help
It would be pretty cool if we had some kind of electronic, Internet-connected paper replacement that we could use to solve all our platform problems (--sent from my iPad). Fact is, however, we're still doing a print magazine because we love it, and from what we can tell, you love it too. So instead of trying to fix our platform problems with newfangled tech, we really just want you to help us make a magazine. We're not asking for much; there's one simple way you can help.
>>Talk to us. You can contact the edit staff through our Editorial Feedback Contact Form on our website (http://gdmag.com/contactus), you can "Like" the magazine's page on Facebook (search for Game Developer Magazine), and you can message us on Twitter (@GameDevMag). Tell us what you like and what you don't like. If something doesn't look right, tell us. If you have a question for us or one of our authors, ask us. If you are working on something you want your peers to know about, tell us about it.
Let's make a better magazine so we can make better games.
GDMag: The Game
Brandon usually used this editorial page for hard-hitting and insightful opinions and commentary on issues and trends in the game industry--which is a tradition I hope to continue--but for this issue I'm going to do something different. I'm going to describe a bit of the process of making a magazine in game development terms, and I'm hoping you'll be able to help us out with it so that we can help you make better games by giving you a better magazine.
At first glance, the process of making a magazine doesn't really look much like the process of making a game--but you'd be surprised how much they can have in common. Games have artists, producers, designers, and testers; we have a small staff that covers the bases (you can see who does what on the masthead to the right of this column). Games often have miserable crunch times for weeks or months before a major development milestone; magazines often have a miserable week every month while we scramble to get everything edited, laid out, and approved in time for our monthly ship date. We may have more in common than you might think!
Magazines as a platform
As a publishing platform for Game Developer, magazines are reliable and consistent enough, although we miss out on a few major features compared to web and mobile-focused publishing platforms. With magazines, we don't have to worry about maxing out your bandwidth or killing your battery life, and we've got our production process down pat. (If you are reading this on our digital edition: Thanks! We're still trying to make it better, and we should have some new announcements on that front soon.)
On the other hand, magazines also give us a few major problems that game devs can sympathize with. First off, we have discoverability issues within the magazine--it's hard to surface each issue's excellent lineup. Outside of the GDMag loyalists who read every issue from cover to cover, we know you guys read the front page, the back page, and the postmortem, but it gets fuzzy after that. Now, we know that most GDMag readers have to wear a lot of developer hats--even if you're primarily a coder, you may need to know a bit about other dev disciplines too--but it's hard to surface all that stuff with only a table of contents and a few small cover lines. You can't really share articles with your friends online, either, so we can't really count on our magazine stuff going viral.
Related to the discoverability problem is an analytics problem--it's not easy to tell what you guys are reading! Print magazines don't really support JavaScript, so we can't track page views or social networking shares or anything like that. And considering our options for reader engagement are rather limited--paper doesn't have any ways to embed apps or plug in with other APIs--the readership statistics we do get aren't easily correlated to what we did in any given issue of the magazine in the first place.
Finally, we have something of a content pipeline problem--we have to outsource most of our content development. After all, pretty much everyone who is good enough at making games to merit publishing in Game Developer is, well, making games, not working as a full-time magazine freelancer. We rely on a wonderful network of expert developers to help us fill our pages every month, but once you've written one or two articles about a game you've been working on for the last two years, we can't really ask you to write a third, so we have to wait for you to make a new game and write about that. As a result, we're constantly on the hunt for more people to tell us about the problems they've solved and the things they've built.
How you can help
It would be pretty cool if we had some kind of electronic, Internet-connected paper replacement that we could use to solve all our platform problems (--sent from my iPad). Fact is, however, we're still doing a print magazine because we love it, and from what we can tell, you love it too. So instead of trying to fix our platform problems with newfangled tech, we really just want you to help us make a magazine. We're not asking for much; there's one simple way you can help.
>>Talk to us. You can contact the edit staff through our Editorial Feedback Contact Form on our website (http://gdmag.com/contactus), you can "Like" the magazine's page on Facebook (search for Game Developer Magazine), and you can message us on Twitter (@GameDevMag). Tell us what you like and what you don't like. If something doesn't look right, tell us. If you have a question for us or one of our authors, ask us. If you are working on something you want your peers to know about, tell us about it.
Let's make a better magazine so we can make better games.
