Game Programming and Console Workings

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you celebrating the holiday, and Ha Ha Ha to those of you who don't get to eat mind-boggling amounts of wonderful food today. Anyway, today Gamastura has a Day in the Life of Andy Thomason, a game programmer for dev tools studio SN. The article seems like it would be geared somewhat towards programmer types, but it doesn't actually get technical. Thomason basically goes through a list of his daily activities punctuated by interesting asides about his job and the industry in general.

The game industry is a fiercely competitive world. Developers who assume that faster console hardware will give them an easier life are usually very disappointed. It is very easy for another developer to sneak in and produce something a lot slicker. The faster the code goes the more art content a game can have, which means that game architectures have to be revised every year to stay in the game. Game technologists are constantly trying out new game architectures and math techniques, and these are the subject of my current book project.

For something that does get a bit more technical, feel free to peruse How Xbox 360 Works, from the generally fascinating and addictive HowStuffWorks.com. The site has featured similar articles on other consoles, but this one does a better job of explaining the fundamentals of the CPU and graphics systems. It goes into the 360's processor architecture of three double-threaded cores and a bit into the ATI GPU. Unfortunately, after that, it sort of turns into rehash of marketing lines about all the awesome stuff that's bundled with the system, but I found it a pretty good read until then.