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A review by dylanhenning
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier
adventurous
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.5
Jason Schreier is an incredible journalist/reporter covering the video game industry and with this book he pulls back the curtain to show us a peek at how video games are made.
The stories of ten different games are told through 10 different chapters covering everything from indies (video games made by a small group of developers not owned by a major company. Sometimes even consisting of just one person.) to major Triple A games (games made by large teams of people with a larger budget. Think Call of Duty, Super Mario, The Last Of Us).
What becomes immediately clear as you read this book is something that I think gets lost in the discourse within the gaming community: No matter how big or small your dev team is, no matter the genre of game you’re making, and no matter how much time you work on it, video games are incredibly hard to make. Each chapter reveals story after story of developers working early mornings and long nights and making incredible personal sacrifices just to get these games across the finish line and out the door.
Next time you buy a game that doesn’t live up to your expectations and you wanna fire off a nasty tweet about it remember that these devs put everything they had into it and no one sets out to make a bad video game.
Now, here’s why I gave this a 4.5: I said this book offers a peek behind the curtain and as I was reading it I felt like there were several moments in telling these stories for Jason to go deeper and talk more about the struggles and challenges these dev teams faced. This book is incredibly close to getting a 5 star rating if it had just given us a bit more at times.
The stories of ten different games are told through 10 different chapters covering everything from indies (video games made by a small group of developers not owned by a major company. Sometimes even consisting of just one person.) to major Triple A games (games made by large teams of people with a larger budget. Think Call of Duty, Super Mario, The Last Of Us).
What becomes immediately clear as you read this book is something that I think gets lost in the discourse within the gaming community: No matter how big or small your dev team is, no matter the genre of game you’re making, and no matter how much time you work on it, video games are incredibly hard to make. Each chapter reveals story after story of developers working early mornings and long nights and making incredible personal sacrifices just to get these games across the finish line and out the door.
Next time you buy a game that doesn’t live up to your expectations and you wanna fire off a nasty tweet about it remember that these devs put everything they had into it and no one sets out to make a bad video game.
Now, here’s why I gave this a 4.5: I said this book offers a peek behind the curtain and as I was reading it I felt like there were several moments in telling these stories for Jason to go deeper and talk more about the struggles and challenges these dev teams faced. This book is incredibly close to getting a 5 star rating if it had just given us a bit more at times.