Games from Within: About this site

About this site

Games from Within is a collection of articles dealing with the game development process written by me (Noel Llopis—who am I?). Specifically, I'm going to be looking at things from an engineering perspective, and not a traditional one at that.

A quick glance at the article categories should give you a good idea what topics I'm covering. They range from broad aspects such as team organization or a look at the content pipeline, all the way down to more focused topics such as test-driven development or evil consequences of certain software architectures.

I'm not going to be passively looking and describing current game development practices either. Most of the time I'm going to be mercilessly questioning basic assumptions and proposing alternatives. I'm a big believer that people need to think, keep an open mind, and question everything. As soon as we stop questioning things around us, we're as good as dead. Some of the ideas presented are probably not in extended usage in the games industry, and some of them are probably downright heretical and unpopular. But if I'm writing about them here, it's because I really think it's worth thinking about them.

I'm an incessant reader, so I expect a recurring topic is going to be looking at books, articles, and papers and seeing how those ideas apply to game development. I'm amazed at how many people in this rapidly-changing industry are happy to sit in their offices without ever looking up and trying to learn anything new not directly related to their current project. Incidentally, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have linked all the books I write about to Amazon.com using a referral link. That means that if you buy one of the books by following a link here, I will get a small commission from Amazon.

What's up with the name Games from Within? It reflects that I'm looking at games, and specifically how we create games, from within the industry, which is a very different perspective than looking at them as a gamer or even as someone looking to break into the industry. I admit to the name being full of second meanings, so feel free to analyze it and extract any meaning you want from it. Besides, gamesfromwithin.com was not taken, so there.

I have no idea how many people (if any) are going to be reading the content here. I write everything here mostly for my own benefit. I find that writing about something helps to make me think about the subject in more detail and helps me organize my thoughts a bit. I also like to put my ideas down in a more permanent form than a conversation or even a mailing list.

Having said that, I certainly welcome any feedback on any of the topics here. Feel free to email me with corrections, suggestions, praises, or even telling me that I have no idea what I'm talking about. Seriously, you're not going to hurt my feelings, so go right ahead any time you want.

I hope you enjoy the content here and learn something new or gain a new perspective into some topic.

Cheers!

--Noel
Email: llopis (at) convexhull (dot) com
30 December 2003