Hi

I really enjoy watching game reviews - but, although there are many many portals to choose from, basiclly all of them are focused on evaluating 'player experience' (what is totally understandable). What I would like to see is a game review from game developer's point of view focused on technical aspects of the game. I don't know if anything like this exists yet but I'd be very gratful for letting me know if there is something that is even closely related to this idea.

Thank you!

Search for the word "postmortem"

http://www.gdcvault.com/

This website has a lot of great talks from developers on how they make games. You need to pay a subscription to have access to all of the content but some of the free stuff is still really good.

Search for the word "postmortem"

http://www.gdcvault.com/

This website has a lot of great talks from developers on how they make games. You need to pay a subscription to have access to all of the content but some of the free stuff is still really good.

From the way i read it, he's looking for a perspective from developers that did not build the game, basically devs that played and enjoyed a game, and have there take on how they think things were done.

You could try Significant Bits (http://www.significant-bits.com) for a design-focused look at various games. The author also posts about his own games and occasionally general topics, but his semi-regular "significant bits of x" posts might be what you're looking for.

(Posted from mobile, please excuse the brevity and lack of formatting.)

From the way i read it, he's looking for a perspective from developers that did not build the game, basically devs that played and enjoyed a game, and have there take on how they think things were done.

That's exactly what I had in mind.

Search for the word "postmortem"

Thanks! Seems pretty cool as well.

If you want code reviews of popular games, look here: http://fabiensanglard.net/

That guy reviewed the source code of a lot of id Software games (from wolfenstein to doom 3) and some other non-shooter games (Prince of Persia, Another World).

Made me think of this journal entry. Not very detailed but I'm fairly positive ShiftyCake analyzed that game with an interest going beyond usual reviewer.

Heh, what are you looking for?

"Hmm, these particle systems seem to be pretty good! I like how the point sprite always faces the camera...as it should!"

Most of the game engines in use these days take care of the technical how-to's so I don't think you'd get a lot of variety in the technical reviews. If you want the deep dive on the technical aspects of a game, you're not going to get it by looking at the game play interface a player would see.

As far as the game design goes, that's a lot harder to review because its not really something tangible and readily evident.
"Oh, I think they're using a variable reinforcement reward system here using equation XYZ with the constant values ABC."

The reason you usually don't see these types of technical reviews is because the audience (game developers) is very small and there isn't really a reason a fellow game developer would need to "review" another developers game. What do either parties get out of it? Nothing. The game has already been shipped and the technical how-to is generally something we can figure out for ourselves if it's not already solved with our tools. If there were bugs / problems, it should have been caught in pre-release QA, not a post-release review.

As far as we're concerned, it's "Hey, congratulations! you shipped a game and it sold really well! Looks like you still have jobs!". That's the only review we really need and we don't need other developers to tell us if we did that well -- the sales figures will tell us that.

I was going to do this a couple of years back, but I am not quite a blogger. So I would probably write just one review, and that's it.

So I just kept the review to myself.