Blood, Sweat and Pixels (Book Review)
A Glimpse behind the scenes of Video Games
A while ago, I came across the book Blood, Sweat and Pixels, which is a fascinating glimpse inside the world of video game development. I am not a video game player, but I am a Software Engineer, so I could relate to many of the development aspects & difficulties. Especially the grind and unrealistic deadlines were relatable for me, as I have also sometimes had to work with tight deadlines, though thankfully much less than was portrayed in this book about the development of video games.
It’s a miracle that any game is made.
An anonymous game developer said this to the author (Jason Schreier) during an interview with an insider to understand what video game development is like. According to the author, this sentiment is pervasive amongst all the people who have ever successfully built & sold a video game. Behind the scenes, the development story of every great video game is filled with funding getting suddenly cut, delays upon delays, developers forced to sacrifice most of their time for the game, etc.
One surefire way to annoy a game developer is to ask, in response to discovering his or her chosen career path, what it’s like to spend all day playing video games.
The above quote from the introduction also perfectly summarizes the gap between what the general public thinks and the reality of video game development. Most of the general public imagines that video game development must be an easy and fun job. Any successful game developer will tell you that game development is not easy. As for the fun parts, these are rare - most of the development time is spent trying to get the game released at any cost. As I mentioned, I am not a video game developer, but I can certainly relate to both the grind for deadlines, and non-technical friends and family thinking software development is easy that they think anyone can do.
But still, why do video game developers need to sacrifice so much of their personal time - why is video game development unique?? After all, software development is done in many other industries also, and while there are some delays, delays in video games are usually so huge that they are incomparable. The author suggests an answer to this quandary: “Video games straddle the border between art and technology in a way that was barely possible just a few decades ago.” Considering that video game developers work at the forefront of both art (pushing the boundaries of interactivity with the player) and high-performance software development (video games are resource intensive, so even sub-second performance improvements can improve the perception of the game).
Stardew Valley
The author talks about how many famous video games were developed. For me, one of the most memorable games I read in this book was Stardew Valley - because it was made full-time by a solo developer, Eric Barone! To get an idea of how astounding this feat is, consider that that modern video games are typically developed by the effort of dozens (if not hundreds or even thousands) of people. Eric was mainly inspired by the RPG game Harvest Moon (now known as Story of Seasons), which he used to play earlier and now set out to re-create its charm. He initially set the target of finishing his game in six months - a target which turned out to be far too optimistic.
His wife, Amber Hageman, supported him in his efforts. Eric worked on Stardew Valley full time, so his wife Amber had to earn enough to support them. But the initial target of six months kept growing - first by a few months, then a year, then 2 years. The main reason for this was feature creep - since there was nobody to hold Eric to a schedule, Eric kept putting everything he thought of in the game. Hageman and other family members regularly asked Barone when Stardew Valley would be done. Finally, after almost five years of working on the game round-the-clock with few breaks, Eric released his game to the public on February 26, 2016. The game proved to be a hit - in the next six months, 1.5 million copies of Stardew Valley had sold, earning Eric and his wife Amber close to 21 million dollars.
Eric still kept working on his game and fixing bugs, and finally took help from Chucklefish (a company that helped Eric launch his game), who assigned programmers to work on multi-media mode and other features.
Diablo III
After a decade of turbulent development, Diablo III had finally gone live, but nobody could play it. Some people gave up and went to bed. Others kept trying. An hour later: The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later. (Error 37) “Error 37” turned into a meme
On May 15, 2012, when the game development studio Blizzard finally launched the much-awaited game Diablo III, the developers thought their days of grinding on the game were finally over - but instead, their troubles had just started. Hundreds of thousands of gamers saw Error 37 when they tried to play the game.
Diablo III made many decisions that gamers disliked - for instance, making the game only available online, with no offline mode. Error 37 was not the only issue - it was just the tip of the iceberg. It had other fundamental problems, such as the difficulty ramping up too fast and legendary items dropping infrequently. But its most controversial feature was its loot system centering around an in-game auction house, where players could buy & sell powerful equipment with real-life money. Critics said this loot system made the game feel like pay-to-win.
In the coming months, Blizzard applied many patches and hotfixes to the game - but they knew these were just bandages over the real issues. Despite its disastrous beginning, Diablo III had sold an astounding ten million copies by July 2012. But Blizzard knew they could make an even better game and made significant changes. Josh Mosqueira was appointed the new director in charge of the game. Josh made several decisions that other designers on the team disagreed with - for example, in the console version of the game, he introduced an Evade feature that would allow players to use a joystick to roll around on the ground, dodging attacks from enemies. The team introduced the Loot 2.0 system - to prevent loot overdose, they decided to drop gold as loot 70% of the time and skewed randomness so that legendary loot items dropping would help the player in their current quest. In response to player complaints, they completely redid the difficulty system, a radical departure from the traditional difficulty system of the Diablo series. But the most impactful change was to drop the controversial pay-to-win in-game auction house and instead give other ways to access the most powerful equipment.
Finally, on March 25, 2014, Reaper of Souls launched - an extension pack to Diablo III. This time, Blizzard had made sure to strengthen their infrastructure so that there was no repeat of Error 37. This extension pack finally made the players love Diablo III - nowadays, when gamers are nostalgic about Diablo III, they think not of the original buggy release but of the much-improved game after the extension pack was released. Diablo III is an incredible story of resilience and bouncing back after a rocky start by actually listening to your users (players).
Conclusion
Is there a way to make great video games without that sort of sacrifice? Is it possible to develop a game without putting in endless hours? Will there ever be a reliable formula for making games that allow for more predictable schedules? For many industry observers, the answers to those questions are: no, no, and probably not.
This quote from the epilogue perfectly sums up this dive into the development of video games. Video game development is unique in many ways because it pushes the boundary of the possible in both interactive art and high-performance software. I summarised the incredible stories of Stardew Valley and Diablo III above because I found them the most memorable. However, the book also tells the stories of many other games - for example, Pillars of Eternity and Shovel Knight, both of which became successful through crowd-funding via Kickstarter (though their journeys were still quite different!), Halo Wars, a game whose development involved lots of conflict between Ensemble (the game studio) and Microsoft (the publisher) and ended up being the last ever game made by Ensemble, Uncharted 4, a game where the designers made the difficult decision to wrap up the story of the popular character, Nathan Drake. There are many more such stories of how popular video games were developed behind the scenes - I encourage everyone to read the book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels to explore the development stories of these and many other games.
In the end, I conclude with the quote below from the epilogue about a game that attempts to show people how video games are actually made:
In 2010, a Japanese company called Kairosoft released a mobile phone game called Game Dev Story. In it, you manage your own development studio, trying to release a string of popular video games without going bankrupt. You design each game by combining a genre and a style (example: “Detective Racing”) and to make progress, you’ll have to make a series of managerial decisions involving your studio’s staff. It’s a hilarious if simplistic take on game development.
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