Actually, making games is pretty hard, writes journalist Jason Schreier in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made.
A word from your art director could mean scrapping and redoing weeks of work. Playtesting games could mean playing the same segments over and over again 'til your eyes fall out. Then there's upper-management politics. And, oh, you might get laid off when the project's done (irrespective of your performance). And there's crunch.
Crunch: A period of intensified labor, say 80-hour-workweeks lasting several months.
What's the book about?
For an industry that creates fun for millions of gamers, why do its employees work so hard, to the point of suffering breakdowns in health, nerves, and relationships?
To find out why, Jason Schreier, an editor for Kotaku.com (a major news site on game industry and culture) interviewed over 100 game developers and other industry insiders. Schreier's findings, told in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (BSP), take the form of 10 stories. Each story features a well-known game from recent years and chronicles the labor pains of its development.
I picked up BSP because I wanted to learn about what it takes to make "triple-A" games like Uncharted 4 or Witcher 3 and indie games like Stardew Valley.
This book dispels the myth that game-makers "sit around playing all day." It imparts deeper appreciation for their hard work and greater awareness of what it takes to make games.
Who might enjoy this book?
- Any gamer.
- Any aspiring game designer/artist/programmer/writer/tester/etc.
Does the book achieve its goal?
Yes. BSP explores several challenges in video game development.
For example, there are challenges presented by ever-evolving technology. Programmers, engineers, and artists periodically embark on a new learning curve to learn or create new tools/software. There are rising expectations from gamers -- for better graphics, better controls, better combat systems etc. To that, add the unpredictability of the creative process.
All of which makes it difficult to plan schedules and budgets. Which leads to working more hours to meet deadlines, especially as a game's launch date approaches. There are scenarios to be tested, bugs to be fixed. Amid the rush to ship a game on time, some employees push themselves (or are pushed) to work brutally long hours for weeks or months on end.
Was the book worth the buck?
Yes. BSP is good feature reporting on an industry that's somewhat secretive, conducted by a veteran journalist and based on dozens of interviews.
Discovering what takes place behind the scenes was fascinating for me. For instance, I enjoyed reading about the interesting leadership dynamics in Chapter 2 (Uncharted 4) between co-directors Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann, and in Chapter 7 (Shovel Knight) between Yacht Club's indie team. I also gained a real sense of the impact caused by upper-management decisions upon employees and the final product (most evident in Chapter 5 on Halo Wars and Chapter 10 on Star Wars 1313).
Every chapter is a self-contained story that makes you root for each game developer to succeed. You get to feel a slice of their pain and share their elation, relief, and victory -- before the next cycle of hard work begins.
See below for chapter previews.
Will the book still be relevant in 5 or 10 years?
I think so. As Schreier says, despite technological "progress" and accumulated experience, similar challenges have persisted for decades in the game industry.
Whether it's Uncharted 4 or Uncharted 14, the issues raised in BSP (such as crunch) will likely remain relevant.
Why does crunch happen and is it inevitable?
Schreier raises this question in BSP and elsewhere (in online articles).
In the book's Epilogue, he writes: "Is there a way to make great video games without that sort of sacrifice?" The answer: "For many industry observers, the answers to those questions are: no, no, and probably not."
BSP got me interested in the subject of crunch, so I read a bunch of articles (see Waypoint, Polygon, Gamesindustrybiz), plus a fascinating survey in Gamasutra. Some folks say crunch is inevitable. Others say crunch is largely a choice, not always a necessary evil.
After reading BSP, I came away with the idea that crunch, as an industry culture, is a necessary evil, though that is not quite Schreier's own stance. I got that impression because Schreier focuses on conveying his interviewees' experience, rather than his personal opinions. And that's something I enjoyed about his reporting style here: He puts the spotlight on his subjects and their thoughts rather than on his own.
However, elsewhere he highlights the costs of crunch and has called it unsustainable (see articles in New York Times and GQ). But at the same time, he hopes to understand it better and calls for "respect for the deep strain" that game-makers undertake.
I wonder if he'll write another book, perhaps titled something like "Crunch: Choice or Compulsory?" I would certainly read it.
CHAPTER PREVIEWS
Still deciding if the book is worth your time? Here's what each chapter is about.
Chapter 1: Pillars of Eternity
- Obsidian's fortunes turned around. They got funding through Kickstarter for Pillars and by undertaking outsourced game work that wasn't their niche. The money poured in, but then they had to live up to promises made to Kickstarter backers. If only they hadn't promised to make two cities instead of one...
- Major plot spoilers! Skip this chapter if you were planning to play Uncharted 4.
- After finishing The Last of Us, co-directors Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley were looking forward to a break. They didn't want to return to the Uncharted series, but alas... They were roped in to replace Uncharted 4 director Amy Hennig who chose to leave the company midway.
- My favorite chapter.
- Stardew Valley was made by a "one-man army," Eric Barone. Though to be fair, it was made by two people -- Eric and his girlfriend, who supported him financially and morally over the years he spent making the game.
- The downside of working alone, without no boss to harangue you, is less accountability. So Barone struggled to finish the game because he kept reworking it. Interestingly, even after he cashed in from Stardew's success, he suffered sleepless nights from fixing bugs all day, being the one-man QA.
- Even an experienced developer can run into disasters like Diablo III's famous "Error 37." But Blizzard recovers. Their story here is one of commitment to players, wanting to maintain fans' trust and loyalty by continually updating their games with patches. They listen to player feedback, break tradition, and evolve with the times, leading to a happy outcome: "Two years after launch, people were finally falling in love with Diablo..."
- Ensemble Studios was faced with the mandate of scrapping what they had worked on for ages and turning it into a Halo game. "Microsoft's executives explained that if Ensemble wanted to make its console RTS, it would have to be based on Halo . . . 'It was basically put as, either you make this Halo or you're all going to get laid off.'"
- BioWare only had 16 months to produce Inquisition after completing Dragon Age 2. "This was to be BioWare's first 3-D open-world game and their first game on Frostbite, an engine that never been used to make RPGs. It needed to be made in roughly two years, it needed to ship on five platforms . . ." And, all to be done "with tools that don't exist."
- The trials and triumphs of an indie developer. This time, a cash-strapped crew of several members who called themselves the Yacht Club. Not only were they short on funds, but they also had a curious leadership dynamic: "From the beginning, Yacht Club had made the unorthodox decision that nobody would be in charge . . . They followed a simple, yet radical rule. If anyone said no to something, they all had to stop doing it."
- It promised to be the next Star Wars, the next Lord of the Rings. But at the same time, there was neither a clear nor unified vision of what Destiny was to be. One employee said, "If you were to go to Bungie and ask people what they thought Destiny was, half the studio would probably say it's a Halo shooter, and the other half would say it's World of Warcraft." Along the way, a number of veteran employees and big names quit or get laid off.
- Polish developer CD Projekt Red's big break came when they obtained rights to localize famous RPGs like Baldur's Gate. In a culture of bootleg games, they had to convince Polish gamers to buy original CDs.
- Eventually, they came around to making their own games. With Witcher 3, the writing/narrative was a high priority. Their policy, according to designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz: "Don't make boring quests . . . Every quest, no matter how small it should be, should have something memorable in it, some little twist, something you might remember it by."
- 1313 was to be "Uncharted ala Star Wars," allowing gamers to role-play as a bounty hunter in Coruscant's criminal underworld. George Lucas himself had a hand in shaping 1313, and increasingly, he wanted to incorporate elements of the new TV show he was developing. Thus begins the tragic tale of a highly anticipated game that was shut down, along with the work of its developer, LucasArts, after Disney bought them over.