Gamasutra Expert Blogs: From Indie Mistakes To Time Fcuk

In our weekly Best of Expert Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game development community who maintain Expert Blogs on Gamasutra. Member Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while the invitation-only Expert Blogs are written by development professionals with a wealth of experience to share. We hope that both sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information about the blogs, check out the official posting guidelines. Here are the top blogs for the week: This Week's Standout Expert Blogs An Indie Developer's Biggest Mistake David Wesley Indie developers understandably tend to concern themselves more with game development than distribution deals, but not giving the latter proper early attention can prove disastrous. Northeastern University's David Wesley explains why. Planckogenesis Part II: Song Structure & Gravy Train Matthew Burns Shadegrown Games' Matthew Burns continues his look at the design and development of the studio's musical shooter Planck, this time focusing on the game's approach to song structure, and the implementation of a particular track. Time Fcuk - A Postmortem Edmund McMillen In another post of design insights into a particular game, Edmund McMillen delves into the fascinating inspirations and motivations behind the excellent Time Fcuk, developed with William Good. He even adopts the Game Developer-style "What went right" and "What went wrong" structure. Megacorps Design Notes Greg Costikyan More design reflections! This time, it's the notorious Greg Costikyan on his latest work, the board game Megacorps. Costikyan discusses how the game's intended themes translated into mechanics, characterizes the game's final form, and offers some useful design principles. Game Design Is About Matching Personalities Gabriel Lievano Why do some people like certain games? Why do some people gravitate towards making certain kinds of games? Gabriel Lievano argues that it's a personality thing.