Devblogging

I'm back from my break over Christmas, baby! Woo!

Since I started this blog, I've been considerably more productive. I've noticed that this is apparently a trend with fairly large number of other developers, who also find blogging to be a beneficial outlet, so I've decided I'm going to write a blog post about blog posting, in the same vein as what I briefly touched on in my previous post on how to prevent burnout.

First and foremost, I find that seeing a number ticking by helps a lot. Game development isn't always the most instantly gratifying process, as it requires you to actually complete a project before you get anything at all. A development blog helps that by giving you a number that you can raise. People want to see or read about things you've done? Put it on your blog! Instant gratification -> acquired.

Secondly, devblogging can gauge public interest to some degree. If you aren't sure how marketable or interesting a mechanic is, make a blog post with some title like "New mechanic!" and watch as people come in to read what you've come up with and maybe just write a comment back. Additionally, it practices your ability to create a short "blurb" to publicize your game with. It's often cited that the best game concepts are those that can be easily or succinctly summarized, and I believe that's true in a lot of cases.

Thirdly, it can be similar to "rubber ducky debugging". This is a fairly well-known practice where developers would place a literal rubber ducky on their desk and verbally explain the bug. I think that making a blog post about a tentative mechanic can help the developer to see clear problems in it that they might not have realized otherwise.

Also, running a development blog does generate some publicity for your project. When it's released and done, you get to easily reach all the repeat viewers of your blog with a single post, as well as gain some new ones if you hint that your project is almost done.

Of course, the real reason to make and maintain a development blog is to gain enough power and enough of a following to enforce social and political influence on an international scale by use of the Internet. I hope that this was obvious from the start, if it wasn't.. sorry.

In any case, if you have done, thanks for reading!