Aran P Ink is a software engineer, artist, musician, and game developer. And their site is like a portfolio of most of those skills. But today, I want to focus specifically on their game development blog. There is (in my opinion) some really great content here. So today, I’ll share what content you’ll find, who should be reading it, my favorite thing about the blog, and what could be improved.
This post is not sponsored in any way. I follow Aran on Twitter, but otherwise do not know them. I just genuinely love their content.
What Content is Here
There are only 4 posts on Aran’s site. One of them is actually a video. All of them focus on a particular element of metroidvania or platformer games.
- Metroidvania Generation
- Better Constraints For Better Dungeons
- Celeste Tilesets, Step-by-Step
- ProcJam Room Design Talk (video)
They are not tutorials in the normal sense. Instead, they address a certain problem. How do we make better procedurally generated dungeons? What makes Celeste’s tileset look so good? Then, it provides a possible solution to that problem and explains that solution in good detail.
Everything is really well thought out and explained (in my opinion).
Who Should Read It
Aran definitely has a love of the metroidvania and platform genres. They’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make these games. And it shows. Read this blog for great insight on procedural generation, and design in metroidvanias and platformers.
Even if you are not particularly interested or focused on metroidvanias or platformers, I still recommend checking out the articles. There are some great pieces of insight and experiments that I think can be applied to a lot of other genres. (Procedural generation for an FPS, perhaps?)
My Favorite Things
What I love about Aran’s blog is that it’s not teaching you how to do a specific thing in a particular way. There is a great feeling of curiosity to it. Everything feels like it is more about figuring out how something is made or what we can do to improve it. You can really get a sense of how Aran thinks about problems and comes up with solutions. And I think it’s really cool to have insight into other developer’s minds like this.
As I learn and grow as a developer and as a blogger, Aran will remain an inspiration to me. I hope one day to have this sense of curiosity and exploration as a developer, while writing high quality content explaining my thought process.
What Needs Improvement
My biggest complaint with Aran’s blog is that there just isn’t enough content. With only 4 posts, you can read through the entire thing within an hour. I could spend hours reading articles if they were available. So I definitely look forward to more in the future.
The other slight concern is the date of the articles. Most of them are from around May 2021. It’s not really that old, though. And for the type of content, I think it’s still perfectly fine.
Conclusion
I absolutely love the game development blog of Aran P Ink. There are only a few articles about metroidvania and platformer design. But they’re all high quality and well worth the read.
Head over to Aran’s site if you are interested in metroidvanias or platformers. There is a ton of great insight that can change the way you think about their design.
If you know of any other blogs similar to Aran’s, let us know about them in the comments below. I always love reading into the thought process of other game developers.