game development

I’m reading BLOOD, SWEAT & PIXELS by Jason Schreier, a book discussing how ten different video games were made. It’s an excellent read, and a great account of the cutthroat competitiveness of the video game industry. Given the complexity of game development, it’s astonishing that any games are ever successful at all.

It also makes me very glad I never got into game development!

My one brush with game development came in 2015 when I had the chance to write a tie-in novel for a game. It seemed like a good opportunity and a fun game, so I wrote a 60k word tie-in novel for the book. Unfortunately, the publisher and the game company had a falling-out shortly after I finished the book, so nothing ever came of it. That said, it wasn’t a wasted experience. I was writing GHOST IN THE INFERNO at the time, and I didn’t want to stop writing INFERNO to work on the game book, so I wrote both of them simultaneously. That was the first time I had ever worked on two different novels at the same time. It was a useful skill, and I’ve done it more or less continuously since.

Unfortunately for the game industry, experiences like that (your project gets canceled because of business reasons) is the norm rather than the exception. Also, it’s a lot better to work on your own intellectual property than on someone else’s, especially if you’re a writer.

But back to the original point, BLOOD, SWEAT & PIXELS is an excellent read, and I definitely recommend it if you’re at all curious about game development.

-JM