7 replies to this topic

[Aliii]

When you have have a developer blog where you have sort of an audience following your projects(I mean a developer blog not a professional portfolio), is it a good idea to include some "personal" stuff ...I mean like how you are trying to find a publisher, how hard is to manage your time with college+developing, etc(you know, the "hard life of an indie developer") .....or just be "cold" and only write about games but not personal stuff.
Any ideas? Thanks!

[TechnoGoth]

It depends what your dev blog is about. If it about you trying to make it as an indie developer then all that other stuff is fine. People want to hear about your trials and tribulations the obstacles you've overcome and the triumphs.

[Lauris Kaplinski]

People generally like personal touch in your blog. They want to know who and why and how someone is writing the game in addition to what the game is about.
The only things to be avoided are overly controversial stuff like political and religious views - unless you only want to restrict your audience to similarly minded people.

[Prinz Eugn]

Personal touches are good, they help the reader relate to you and add interest in times where your progress has been slim or really boring.

[swiftcoder]

However, if you are pitching this as a technical blog, then I want to see technical articles, god damn it. And personal crap does not belong in technical articles.

Then again, maybe I'm just old fashioned.

[Wilhelm van Huyssteen]

Im guessing many people prefer it otherwise but I also hate it when people open their technical blog entries with 2 paragraphs about their social life. On the other hand I like it when the author goes into detail about why he did X or why he did not do Y even if it means spelling out his thought processes. I don't mind well placed metaphors or popular culture references to ad some "personality" to the blog post but i generally want technical blogs to be technical.

Another thing. I see way too many "Planned Features blog posts". A good technical blog post should be an in depth analysis of a completed piece of work. A "I'm panning on having a dynamically generated terrain, I think I'm going to use method X or Y" post is not interesting or helpful. But a "I have implemented a dynamic terrain generator for my game using method X because method Y had these drawbacks and here's some screenshots and a link" is a 1000 times better. Poelpe feel that for some reason they must do a blog post every week/month/right now regardless of whether they have something usefull to blog about or not. That just adds to the clutter imo.

I feel that all journals on gamedev should be technical. But maybe thats not the aim of the site in wich case my opinion is moot.

Edited by Wilhelm van Huyssteen, 14 September 2012 - 04:40 AM.

[ToddF]

I'd always want to read about the personal human aspects of a developer's story.

[Drakonka]

I prefer to see a personal touch in dev blogs and get an idea of the kind of person writing the post and making this game, but I also don't need to know about the person's every relationship issue if it is being touted as a dev blog.

Edit: Sorry, I saw this thread is a few weeks old just after posting >.< Didn't mean to bump an old topic

Edited by Drakonka, 11 October 2012 - 09:11 AM.