Business and Production: A GameDev.net Collection
A lot of the developer folk in this community (who are a minority around here, but do hang around) may be familiar with GameDev.net. This quarter, GameDev.net is releasing four books about game development. The first one shipped on the 13th, entitled Business and Production: A GameDev.net Collection. If you are interested, it's available at Amazon:

Business and Production: A GameDev.net Collection

If it's sold out there, you can also get it from Course PTR.

I haven't read the book yet - though I'm expecting my copy any day now. But I do have an article in it. See, this book series consists of both new articles and some of the "best of" articles from GameDev.net.

A few summers ago, I wrote an article for GameDev.net entitled, "How to Write a Game in a Week from Scratch with No Budget." It was the saga of me creating a very stripped down RPGish game called "Hackenslash" in 40 hours of development time - a theoretical "work week."

The game is pretty horrible, probably amusing only for programmer-types. But the point was to really challenge myself and see what it would take starting with no engine, using a library that I was unfamiliar with, using all free resources. Part of my rationale for doing it was in answer to some concerns at GameDev.net and GarageGames.com forums about the cost of resources and game engines, and the people who were using that as an excuse to not even get started.

I don't know if Hackenslash is exactly a poster child for proving much of anything - but I have gotten a lot of emails from people who appreciated the article, and some of them have gone on to make (much better) games in Python & PyGame after reading it. So I guess some folks found some value in the thing.

And GameDev.net judged it worthy to be included in this book. Which thrilled me.

I am pleased that this book is seeing print. I think we need more books on this aspect of game development, especially with the rise of indie gaming. Back when I started, I had no friggin' clue what I was doing. Sure, I'd been a professional game programmer for six years, had some hit games with my name in the credits. But jumping the gap between being a proverbial cog in the wheel to actually selling my own game online was a lot harder than I thought. I'd heard professional indies explain that writing the game was only half of the work involved - and I thought they were exaggerating.

Nope, they were not. It's definitely not the most sexy part of game development (and believe me... very little of game development is all that sexy). But there's a lot to it. It's very time consuming. It can make or break your game. But if you are going to spend all that time, energy, and money doing it anyway, you may as well do it right. I know I still have plenty to learn.

Once I get my contributor's copy of the book, I'll post some kind of review here about it and let you know what other gems of wisdom are to be found on business and production in game development.

(In case you are wondering - no, I don't get royalties on the book. So I have no vested financial interest in its success. I just hope its cool, in spite of my article...)

Labels: Biz, productivity

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