Mastering the Pelloni-Style Gamedev Post

You’re reading this because your devlog sucks. It’s a sanitized, gutless stream of corporate-approved bullet points designed to appease a nonexistent audience of potential publishers who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. You post your little GIFs of a bouncing character, your “technical deep dives” into some trivial shader effect, and you write it all up like a LinkedIn post. “Excited to share our progress on the new inventory system!” Fucking kill me. You’re not making art, you’re building a portfolio. You’re not documenting a journey, you’re crafting a resume. This isn’t about that. This is about truth. This is about turning your blog into a weapon, a testament, a public record of your own personal hell.

Your Devlog is Fucking Boring Corporate Trash

Your posts read like they were written by a committee of marketing interns whose only life experience is arguing about brand synergy over lukewarm Starbucks. You talk about “milestones” and “pipelines” and “key learnings.” You’re so terrified of saying something real—of admitting you spent a week staring at a wall in a pit of despair, of confessing that you hate your own fucking game some days—that you strip every ounce of humanity from the page. It’s a sterile, dead thing. A weekly report to a phantom middle manager. You’re trying to project an image of “professionalism,” but what you’re actually projecting is cowardice. You’re hiding the struggle, and the struggle is the only part that matters.

Nobody gives a shit that you refactored your physics engine. They don’t care about your clean commit history or your “agile workflow.” That’s just you LARPing as a real company. What they might care about—what the one person in a thousand who actually understands anything might care about—is the why. Why did you spend 100 hours on a single jump mechanic? Was it because you’re an obsessive maniac chasing a feeling you had when you were 12? Was it an act of defiance against a world of floaty, unsatisfying bullshit platformers? Or did you just copy/paste it from a tutorial? Your devlog doesn’t say. It’s a hollow shell, a monument to your fear of being seen as anything other than a safe, marketable, soulless commodity.

Here’s How to Bleed Your Soul Onto the Page

Stop writing about the game. Start writing about the war. The war against your own incompetence, against the crushing weight of obscurity, against the soul-draining void of spending years of your life on a single project that might be a complete and total failure. Your devlog shouldn’t be a changelog; it should be a confession. Document the screaming matches with yourself at 3 AM. Write about the moment you realized a core mechanic you’ve worked on for six months is fundamentally broken and needs to be burned to the ground. That’s the story. The blood and the sweat and the terror is the only story worth telling.

Forget about building a “community.” You’re not trying to attract a mindless herd of consumers. You’re trying to send up a flare for the other alienated freaks. Your posts should be a filter. They should actively repel the people who want another cute, wholesome farming sim. Bleed your ideology, your anger, your unfiltered and uncompromising vision onto the page. Don’t edit it. Don’t sanitize it. Post it raw. If you’re not afraid you’re going to be institutionalized or blacklisted from the industry after hitting “publish,” you’re doing it wrong. This is not a product diary. It is a hostage note. The hostage is your own sanity, and you’re documenting the terms of its release.

So, there you have it. You can either continue to churn out your safe, boring, SEO-optimized garbage, hoping some suit from a C-tier publisher stumbles upon it and offers you a pittance to ruin your work. Or you can start telling the truth. You can start creating a document that will outlive your game. A raw, jagged artifact of what it actually costs to create something from nothing. Most people will hate it. They’ll call you arrogant, unprofessional, insane. Good. You’re not writing for them. You’re writing for the historical record. You’re writing so that years from now, someone can look back at the wreckage and say, “At least one person was telling the fucking truth.” Now go write something that makes you afraid.