If you are interested in writing for Gamedev.Net, we'd love to hear from you. Our site receives tens of thousands of visitors per day! This is a great way to get exposure for yourself, as well as for any web sites or companies you are associated with. If you are a registered member of GameDev.net, the article you contribute will be credited in your user profile. Your article will be put in the spotlight for others to read. So what better way is there to share your experience with other game developers?

The majority of visitors to GameDev.net are looking to gain experience and knowledge from professionals, and to learn new techniques and methods to develop games on all platforms. We strongly support both the beginners and hobbyists looking to take part in the industry and the active professionals looking to improve their craft. When considering an article to submit, keep in mind these various audiences and make sure you choose the one(s) you wish to target before you begin to write. Some broad examples are:

Beginners

These people are just beginning to build an interest in game development and are looking for entry-level guidance on how to get started. They have usually played games, and they might have heard some disconnected fragments about how development works, but they’re generally technically uninformed. Try and make sure that any technical terms you use are sufficiently explained, and don’t try to cram too much information into too small a space.

Intermediates

These are people who have a decent working knowledge of most parts of game development. They’ve made some games, and might be headed towards pulling together something for a shareware release – or they might be junior programmers in the industry. These folks are usually most interested in information that helps to solidify and consolidate their understanding of things, maybe showing them new ways of doing common things or case studies of other projects. They’re also interested in content that introduces them to topics they don’t really know about, without treating them like a complete beginner.

Specialists

These are people who have a solid grounding in a particular area, are comfortable reading whitepapers and playing with cutting-edge stuff; they’re usually employed in their field or pursue it very actively as a hobby. These are the people you can present your fantastic new shadowing method or impressive approach to team-based AI to. But take care: these are people who know their stuff and will notice if something isn’t quite right, so make sure you’ve checked everything out, and include full references to support your ideas.

There are several ways you can contribute content to Gamedev.net. If you're looking for ideas on topics to write about, please visit our Article Proposals and Requests forum, and be sure to expand the history to see posts dating back months and years so you can look at more ideas submitted by members of our community.

Articles

We welcome all article submissions; these papers can be anything from a research paper to a "how-to" on any aspect of game development. Articles that are original and previously unpublished can appear on our main page as a Featured Article. If your article is already available online, then we can still consider publishing it internally as a link in our Reference database.

Sweet Snippets

If you have a coding method that is too short to describe in a feature-length article (see Content Guidelines below) we would still like to see it for consideration as a Sweet Snippet.

Product Reviews

Have you extensively used a certain product that you feel would benefit other game developers? One way to get the word out would be to write a review on the product that would be published here on Gamedev.net. If you've had lots of experience with certain tools in the industry (visual arts tools, audio tools, programming tools, etc) and would like to lend your expertise to review new tools in your field, we can also provide you with products to review.

Book Reviews

Contributing a book review is the easiest way to get yourself published on Gamedev.net. All you have to do is simply visit a book page from our Books Resources section, click the "Write an online review" link below the book's description, submit your review with a score and in a few days it will be up on the site, pending moderation. Let other people know whether a book is a dud or a valuable gem.

When writing an article, you don't need to worry about HTML formatting as we will reformat each article to fit in with the rest of the site. Generally, short paragraphs work best for the web, and you should try to divide your article into sections preceded by headers. You may include snippets of code within your article. The final article may be in HTML format, Microsoft Word, RTF, or plain text. Formats that are difficult to convert to HTML - such as PDF or PostScript - are not permitted. If you would like to use another format, please contact us in advance to confirm that we can work with your desired format. You may include artwork within your article. For images low in colors, we generally prefer GIF files (for graphs, graphical text, etc). Photograph quality images should be saved in JPEG format, or PNG if you prefer.

Guidelines for Content

You should consider the following guidelines when submitting content:

• Articles need to be a decent length. Having a concise writing style is one thing, but if you've explored every possible avenue within a topic and it's still only a couple of paragraphs then maybe you should reconsider whether it deserves a full article. If you want to maximize the chance that we'll pick your article to be featured on the front page, you should aim to produce at least three A4 pages of 10pt Arial font, single spaced, not including images or other embedded non-text media.
• References should be included wherever possible, either as in-line links in the text or as a bibliography at the end. A "further reading" section never hurts.
• In the vast majority of cases, we don't begin publishing a series of articles until all parts of the series have been completed, submitted, and approved. If you've got an article series in mind, think hard about it; you can write an article that "builds" on a previous one, perhaps under a new title, without it becoming a series. Write your articles in such a way that they don't build an expectation of more to come – that they're self-contained – and we'll be able to treat them as individual articles instead of a series.
• Ideally, by the time you submit your article you should have researched all the information you needed, but don't be afraid to admit that you don't know something. It's better to do that than to misinform people, especially when someone who does know it calls you out.
• Compilable code is not necessarily the best way to demonstrate a concept, even when commented. Consider whether pseudocode would be clearer. That said, if you're going to include a downloadable code package to accompany the article, make sure it compiles.
• Real-world examples are great. If you can talk about something in the context of an existing game, it can really help to ground the concepts for people and help them to see how they fit into the big picture.

Got an Idea?

Please submit a proposal email to writers@gamedev.net that explains the idea for your article in as much detail as possible, an outline of the article/series would be best. Also be sure to include your credentials and background in the gaming industry as well. We will return your email letting you know whether we accept the proposal or not. In the case of rejection we will try to provide feedback to help you retailor the article to better fit our audience.

Already Composed

You can submit completed articles to us as a single .zip/HTML/text file for review using our online submission form. Please use the form instead of emailing us; the form is directly linked to our editorial tracking system, allowing editors to begin looking over your content immediately; email is slower and is prone to problems with things like junk mail filters. If your article is already published, you only need to send us an email with the link and your industry background.

Product Reviews

If you're interested in reviewing a specific product or writing reviews for products we have available, please contact John Hattan with your details, including development background and any products you have used in the range you are interested in reviewing.

By submitting your article to GameDev.net, you are granting to us a permanent, non-exclusive license to use the article in any format we deem appropriate, with the assurance that you will always be given full credit for your work, and that you will retain full ownership of it. If you are planning on submitting your article to other websites, we ask that you inform us of your intent, and that you not allow other sites to post the article until it has appeared on GameDev.net for at least 30 days.

Any source code must be provided with non-viral licenses. Public domain is preferred, but we will accept zlib or MIT style licenses as well.

Articles must be published under the author's real name; we permit the use of an initial where some anonymity is desired, e.g. "Drew Sikora" and "Drew S."

Drop us an email:

ten.vedemag@sretirw