New Story Bundle Book – GameDev Stories: Interviews About Game Development and Culture
Image Not Found.I'm proud to announce that GameDev Stories: Interviews About Game Development and Culture is now available exclusively as part of Story Bundle's game dev-themed bundle.
Story Bundles are pay-what-you-want collections of books that follow a certain theme. Pay at least $5, and you get three books. Paying $15 or more will get you all 10 books in the bundle, including GameDev Stories and my Making Fun: Stories of Game Development – Volume 1 book as a bonus.
I've been wanting to write a book like GameDev Stories for a while, because I've finally got the material to do it. The book collects over a dozen of the interviews I've conducted over more than a decade of writing about how games are made and the people who make them. If you enjoy reading conversational-style Q&As with developers, this book offers over 300 pages of pure, undiluted conversation.
Even though most of GameDev Stories had technically already been written because I'd transcribed the interviews collected within anywhere from months to years ago, assembling them as a book took quite a bit of work. First, I dug through my interview archives and picked 18 of my favorites. Next, I wrote an introduction to each one to give context (background on the interviewee, the project for which I originally wrote the interview). Finally, I read through the book to clean up typos and grammatical errors I may have missed when I originally transcribed these interviews (the oldest of these dates back to 2006, when I was wet behind the ears and making all sorts of typing and formatting flubs) and apply stylization I've come to use in recent years to achieve consistency in structure and form between all of the interviews, while still preserving the voice of each interviewee.
That brings me to another of my goals in writing GameDev Stories. I've talked to plenty of programmers and designers, and they're represented in the book, but I wanted to go beyond those talented individuals and learn about folks in industry positions that don't always get a chance to step into the spotlight: user experience (UX) researchers, community managers, collectors, magazine editors, artists, and more.
Below, you'll find the book's summary and a couple of reviews from early readers. I encourage you to check out the Story Bundle, which runs from today through December 21 and features work from top-notch writers. Once again, I am grateful to Story Bundle curators Simon Carless and Jason Chen for putting me in such good company.
Enjoy the book,
~David
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Programmer. Artist. Musician. Designer. Producer. Editor. Collector.
Video games comprise a multibillion-dollar industry thanks to the people who make and play them. From designers and producers to collectors, community managers, editors, and hardware manufacturers, each plays a role in maintaining and advancing the medium of interactive entertainment.
Each has a story to tell.
Collected from the author's archives, GameDev Stories: Interviews About Game Development and Culture gathers conversations with individuals from all corners of the industry: Who they are, the paths they paved, and their contributions to our hobby.
- John Romero, co-founder of id Software
- Jennell Jaquays, writer and designer
- Scott Miller, founder of Apogee Software and shareware pioneer
- Kyoko Higo, former associate marketer at Square U. S.
- S. D. Perry, novelist
- David Brevik, co-creator of Diablo and Diablo 2
- "The Immortal" John Hancock, collector
- Meagan Marie, writer and community manager
- And More