Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

Executive Summary: I think this book can appeal to both software developers and fans of video games alike, but it's definitely targeted more at the latter than the former.

Full Review
This book was previewed with an excerpt from the chapter on Diablo 3 (which incidentally is the ONLY game in this book that I've actually played/plan to play).

When I was younger I wanted to make video games. Somewhere along the way however I felt like I'd rather spend my time PLAYING games instead of making them. This book helps to illustrate why. I work 40 hours/week as a software developer. There have been days or weeks where I had to stay late, or when things went sideways and I was fighting a fire. But nothing like the “crunch” described in every single story in this book.

It's a wonder games get made at all. These people must really love making games. Personally, I'll stick to writing business apps for my day jobs and keeping video games something I consume.

I've read some better/more in-depth books about video games, but this made for a decent sampler with a variety of stories. It was a quick read, with each game getting a single chapter of about 20-30 pages each.

Each story in here is unique enough to be interesting, but they do all share a theme of things running over budget, behind schedule and requiring insane hours/overtime to finish at all. You get some stories of indie games, and huge big budget games and a few in between.

The tone is definitely more for fans of games, and not (potential) developers. Anything even slightly technical seems to be explained in a footnote that I often skipped, but I imagine will be useful to most readers. I didn't find that to be the detriment of the book however, as despite also being a software developer, I'm a fan of video games.

Of all of these stories, the Stardew Valley one was probably the most interesting. I had mostly picked this up to read the rest of the Diablo 3 story (so good job on that marketing Kotaku!), but I liked reading about all of these games.

I think if you're a fan of any of these games, or just a big fan of videogames in general, this is a pretty good read.