Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
by Jason Schreier
To finish the first Age of Empires, Ensemble’s staff went through what Dave Pottinger, a lead designer, described as “a terrible death march which could never be repeated today,” working one-hundred-hour weeks for nearly a year. “What makes it really hard is you can build a game, you can test a game, and you can think you know the game—until you release it,” said Mosqueira. “Within the first day, probably more people have spent more hours playing the game collectively than [in] the entire development up to that point. So you’re going to see things you never intended. You’re going to see players reacting to things. They’re playing with it, they’re engaging with it, they’re interacting with it. And really, what makes it hard is learning the discipline and the rigor to know how to react to that.”
To finish the first Age of Empires, Ensemble’s staff went through what Dave Pottinger, a lead designer, described as “a terrible death march which could never be repeated today,” working one-hundred-hour weeks for nearly a year.
By all accounts it was the biggest development deal in video game history. And although Destiny’s basic concepts were still in flux, Activision’s executives signed the deal with the expectation that they’d get something like Halo. “The core [of Bungie’s pitch] was very much what shipped,” said one person involved in the contract negotiations. “It was a sci-fi space opera. Shooter meets MMO.”
Kading went to BioWare’s leadership with a proposal: give him the authority to call up the entire Inquisition team once a week for an hour, four weeks in a row, for mandatory play sessions. The leads said yes. So Kading opened his own little laboratory, working with the other designers to construct a set of combat encounters that the rest of the team could test out.
Not long after starting at LucasArts, Markus put the studio through what one former staffer described as “a boot camp” for controls, camerawork, and basic gameplay rhythms. Markus believed the best way to make a video game was to spend as much time as possible in preproduction, which meant lots of talking, prototyping, and answering questions both big and small.
Bungie, like many large studios, dedicated a great deal of time to what could technically be called “preproduction” but what was really just the act of figuring out what their next game was going to be. That was one of the most challenging parts of making any game—narrowing the possibilities down from infinity to one.
"To finish the first Age of Empires, Ensemble’s staff went through what Dave Pottinger, a lead designer, described as “a terrible death march which could never be repeated today,” working one-hundred-hour weeks for nearly a year."
"“What makes it really hard is you can build a game, you can test a game, and you can think you know the game—until you release it,” said Mosqueira. “Within the first day, probably more people have spent more hours playing the game collectively than [in] the entire development up to that point. So you’re going to see things you never intended. You’re going to see players reacting to things. They’re playing with it, they’re engaging with it, they’re interacting with it. And really, what makes it hard is learning the discipline and the rigor to know how to react to that.”"
"“There’s a person who’s been making the tours promoting her book”—the psychologist Angela Duckworth—“and she used to write about grit. She said grit is this quality that a lot of successful people have. And it’s this persistence, to push forward with something. Anything worth doing, it’s not necessarily day-to-day fun sometimes. Sometimes it is. Great when it is. But grit usually means that somebody sees the long-term goal and they see the long-term vision and they push through any obstacles that they have on a day-to-day basis, with the end in mind.”"
"“The biggest differentiator between a studio that creates a really high-quality game and a studio that doesn’t isn’t the quality of the team,” said one person who worked on Destiny. “It’s their dev tools. If you can take fifty shots on goal, and you’re a pretty shitty hockey player, and I can only take three shots on goal and I’m Wayne fucking Gretzky, you’re probably going to do better. That’s what tools are. It’s how fast can you iterate, how stable are they, how robust are they, how easy is it as a nontechnical artist to move a thing.”"
"One quote, delivered by the director of StarCraft II, Dustin Browder, has always stuck out as a telling description of how Blizzard makes video games. In June 2012, over a year after Blizzard had hoped to ship StarCraft II’s first expansion, Heart of the Swarm, Browder spoke to me about the game’s progress. “We are ninety-nine percent done,” he said, “but that last one percent’s a bitch.” Heart of the Swarm wouldn’t come out until March 2013. That last one percent took nearly a year."
"In game development, one of the most important pairs of buzzwords is also the one you’re most likely to see on a hacky marketing résumé: “unified direction.” In other words, everyone needs to be on the same page. Because video games have so many granular moving pieces—sounds, user interface, visual effects, and so on—every department needs to have a strong, consistent idea of where a game is headed. The larger a team gets, the more important this concept becomes."
"Every game is delayed at least once. Every game developer must make tough compromises. Every company must sweat over which hardware and technology to use. Every studio must build its schedules around big trade shows like E3, where developers will draw motivation (and even feedback) from throngs of excited fans. And, most controversially, everyone who makes video games has to crunch, sacrificing personal lives and family time for a job that seems to never end."
- →To finish the first Age of Empires, Ensemble’s staff went through what Dave Pottinger, a lead designer, described as “a terrible death march which could never be repeated today,” working one-hundred-hour weeks for nearly a year.
- →‘Perfect is the enemy of good,’” said the writer Josh Scherr. “You’re polishing something that’s at ninety-five percent while this thing over here at sixty percent needs a lot of love. So that was what made crunch hard, because [when] you’d get down into it, you’d have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.”
- →Most game projects have a single lead. Whether they call themselves “creative director” (à la Josh Sawyer on Pillars of Eternity) or “executive producer” (like Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Mark Darrah, whom we’ll meet in chapter 6), the one thing they all have in common is that they always get the final call.
- →Eric Barone, a self-proclaimed introvert, had a different plan. He wanted to write every line of dialogue, draw every piece of art, and compose every song on the soundtrack by himself. He even planned to program the game from scratch, eschewing established engines, because he wanted to see if he could.
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