Writer’s Kit
Postmortems
Postmortems are reports written at the end of a project that deliver real-world knowledge of vital project management skills. Usually written by game programmers, postmortems on iDevGames follow projects from start to finish with thorough, and specific accounts of the good and bad decisions made along the way. You learn how each game was made, the kind of people involved, what tools were used, as well as major milestones. Most importantly, you get a candid account of What Went Right — contributing to the project’s success — and What Went Wrong, a list of misjudgments, failures, or missed opportunities.
Why write a postmortem? The foremost reason should be for you to progress your development craft — only by learning from our mistakes do we improve our games. Your wisdom will also help other developers avoid the same game development pitfalls, thus helping to increase the quality of games for Apple’s Mac and iPhone platforms. Publishing your postmortem on the largest community for Mac and iPhone developers is a great public relations tool, helping to bring more visitors to your website and recognition from industry insiders.
Before writing your postmortem, we suggest reading a few of the postmortems on iDevGames to give you a clearer idea of what we expect. The various topics of your postmortems should be broken into headers and sub-headers and overall length should be at least 1,200 words. A possible format for your postmortem might include the following topics:
- Background on the project, how the idea for the game came about, game design doc
- Your team and the tools used
- What went wrong, listing in their own paragraphs a few points
- What went right, listing in their own paragraphs a few points
- Conclusion, lessons learned, next step
Your postmortem can be submitted in the following text formats: plain text (.txt), RTF (.rtf), Open Office (.odt) or Microsoft Word (.doc). Your document should not contain images, rather, all screenshots should be included in separate files. Screenshots should be at least 600 pixels in height for Mac games. Please remove all desktop images (i.e. windows, icons, dock, etc) if your screenshot is not full-screen. The recommended file formats for screenshots, in order of preference, are: TIFF, PSD, PNG, JPEG2000 and JPEG. We ask that you include at least three screenshots of your game. Images such as pen sketches, workstation photos, game asset creation tools, level editors or team pictures are also welcomed.
The end of your postmortem should contain an information box that highlights key points of your game project. For example, project name, project URL, developer name, team size, critical applications, SDKs, APIs, etc.
Your submission (text and images) should be compressed in a single file and emailed to our Editor-in-Chief, Carlos Camacho.
