Submit an article idea to the editors

Who Reads Us

Most of our 35,000 readers work in medium- and large-sized North American game development companies. 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.

Game Developer welcomes 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.

  • Interviews. Game Developer sometimes interviews leading figures in the field of digital entertainment. If you have credentials as an interviewer (a journalism background, for example) or if you had exceptional access to someone whose work is important to game development, let us know.

  • 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.

How to Submit a Feature Proposal

Put together an outline of the article that you'd like to write. It should start off with a problem that game developers face, and then methodically explain the solution. It should explain the domain in which the solution works, the tools required, any potential drawbacks. You should also support your solution with source code example and figures or screenshots (in BMP, TIF, or other nonlossy file format). The outline doesn't have to be long (one page will do), but it should clearly describe your idea.

Send that outline in an email to the editors. We may make a decision on the spot to go with it as-is, or we might suggest some changes. If we have already covered this topic in the magazine, or think that you might be better off shopping it around to another magazine, we'll let you know.

If you get the green light for the article, you'll have between 4-6 weeks to write it and get it to us.

If you've already written an article, we'll take a look. Send it to us at the above email address. We deal with things in a strict FIFO manner, so we can't always give you feedback right away. Be patient. Alternatively, you can send it to our snailmail address:

Game Developer
600 Harrison St. 6th floor
San Francisco, CA 94107
Attn.: Submissions

Article Formatting

Features should be approximately 3500-4000 words. We reformat all articles during the production phase, so you should not worry about page layout. However, here are a few things you should know to give your articles a professional appearance:
  • 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.

  • You should only worry about three fonts: a body font, a subhead font, and a code font. Code font should be used for program code, variable names, program names, and object names.

  • Code snippets of four lines or less can be put inline with the text. Anything longer needs to be broken out into listings.

  • Our listings are either 40 or 80 characters wide. Please format your code in a way that minimizes lines but maintains good style.

  • 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.

  • Artwork should be sent as uncompressed TIFF or BMP files, or layered PSD files if they include fonts or vector-based layers. We have artists on staff, so diagrams and charts do not have to be "picture perfect". Don't sweat these details.

  • Number illustrations sequentially and reference them in the text. Do not include your illustrations in the document. Please use this format instead: [INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE].

  • Provide captions for the artwork, and remember that captions should not repeat what was stated in the article.

  • 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 should include books and web sites.

  • GDmag's taboo words & phrases as of right now: "cool", "sucks", "kicks ass". (More to come, we're sure...)

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."

The text must be more than a walkthrough of the code: "Then, we call foo(). This returns an integer, iRetVal, which we pass to bar()."

Want to Improve Your Chances Even More?

Check out our editorial calendar and come up with ideas that fit the themes of upcoming issues. The lead time for an issue is at least three months. So if you have an idea, make sure that you suggest it to us at least 4 months in advance (factoring in at least 1 month for you to write the article).

Send us your ideas in an email, along with information about yourself, including your game development background and who you are currently employed by.

 


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