Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Quotes

“One surefire way to annoy a game developer is to ask, in response to discovering his or her chosen career path, what it’s like to spend all day playing video games.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Making a game is like constructing a building during an earthquake or trying to run a train as someone else is laying down track as you go...”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“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.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Age of Empires was big, but compared with Halo it had the cultural impact of a brunch photo on Instagram.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Oh, Jason", he said. "It's a miracle that any game is made".”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“At one point, Tost’s team noticed a serious problem in Velen: there was too much to eat. “Velen was always supposed to be this famine-ridden land,” said Tost, “where people don’t really have a lot of food.” For some reason, though, an environment artist had stocked up many of Velen’s homes, filling the cabinets with sausages and vegetables. It bothered the level designers too much to leave as it was, so they spent hours digging through every village in Velen, taking food away from the people like twisted reverse Robin Hoods. “We had to go through all the houses in this area and make sure there was barely any food,” Tost said.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“I remember calling my dad and saying, ‘Hey, I turned down a raise and quit my job.’ And his response was, ‘Why?’ It’s like, ‘Oh, we’re going to put together this project and it’s going to be really great and we’re going to put it up on something called Kickstarter, where we take donations.’ His response was, ‘Well, let me know when your begging site is up.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“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.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Everything would begin in the writer’s room. “We start with a very general idea,” said Jakub Szamałek, one of the writers. “Then we expand it, then we cut it into quests, then we work closely with quest designers to make sure it all makes sense from their perspective. And then we iterate and iterate and iterate.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Isn’t that one of the reasons we love video games in the first place? That feeling of surprise when you pick up a controller and know you’re about to experience something totally new?”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Here’s an alternative theory: every single video game is made under abnormal circumstances. Video games straddle the border between art and technology in a way that was barely possible just a few decades ago.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“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.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“The standard burn rate for a game studio was $10,000 per person per month, a number that included both salaries and overhead costs, like health insurance and office rent.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Traditionally, independent studios like Obsidian and Double Fine had three ways to stay afloat: (1) finding investors, (2) signing contracts with publishers to make games, or (3) funding their own video games with war chests they’d hoarded via options one and two.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Double Fine had found a fourth option: Kickstarter, a “crowdfunding” website that had launched in 2009. Using this website, creators could pitch directly to their fans: You give us money; we’ll give you something cool.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Most video games are built by teams of dozens of people, each of whom specializes in fields like art, programming, design, or music. Some games, like Uncharted 4, employ staffs in the hundreds and use work from outsourced artists across the world. Even small independent developers usually rely on contractors and third-party game engines.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“While most people seem to think that game development is about ‘having great ideas,’ it’s really more about the skill of taking great ideas from paper to product,”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“By reading pixel art theory and watching guides on YouTube, Barone figured out how to compose each sprite by drawing individual pixels. He knew nothing about complicated video game lighting techniques, but he learned how to fake them, drawing semitransparent white circles that he’d place behind torches and candles to evoke the illusion that they were brightening rooms.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Indie game developers couldn’t just slap their games on Steam and call it a day, though: they needed to get Valve’s explicit approval. This was a problem. Barone didn’t know anyone at Valve. He didn’t have any publishing contacts.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Steam Greenlight. With Greenlight, Valve crowdsourced its approval process, allowing fans to vote on the games they’d want to play. Games that hit a certain number of votes (a number that the famously secretive Valve kept quiet) would automatically get a spot in the store.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Yes, Barone said. He was thinking he might make a game about catching bugs. I asked how long he thought it might take. “I’m trying to be a little more realistic this time around,” Barone said. “I’m hoping it takes two years.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“I think the real story of Destiny’s development is that just making any game is incredibly hard,” said Jaime Griesemer. “Trying to make an ambitious game under a lot of pressure is staggeringly hard. . . . When you have just quantic explosions and craterings and huge assimilation and communication problems on a team, you end up wasting so many resources and so much time that you see it in the final game.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“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.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“There was something about Bungie’s trajectory from small and scrappy to king of the world to over-the-hill dinosaurs,” said Griesemer. “They accumulated the negative traits of all of those stages. So there was the immaturity of being young and scrappy, the arrogance of being on top of everything, and then there was the stubbornness and inability to change from the dinosaurs stage.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“Perhaps because of this unusual structure, Naughty Dog took an abnormal approach to detail. If you look closely at any scene in Uncharted 4, you’ll spot something extraordinary—the creases on Drake’s shirt; the stitches on his buttons; the way he pulls the leather strap over his head when he equips a rifle. These details didn’t pop up out of the ether. They emerged from a studio full of people obsessive enough to add them to the game, even if it meant staying at the office until 3:00 a.m. “We’ll take it as far as we possibly can,” said Phil Kovats, the audio lead. “We all wanted to make sure that, because this was the last Nathan Drake game we were making, it was going to go out with as much stuff as we possibly could.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“a new console generation was on the way, but analysts and pundits were predicting that console gaming was doomed thanks to the rise of iPhones and iPads. Publishers didn’t want to invest tens of millions of dollars into big games without knowing that people would actually buy the next-generation Xbox One and PS4.*”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“During those last few months, the writer Patrick Weekes would take builds of Inquisition home and let his nine-year-old son play around with the game. His son was obsessed with mounting and dismounting the horse, which Weekes found amusing. One night, Weekes’ son came up and said he’d been killed by a bunch of spiders, which seemed strange—his son’s characters were too high a level to be dying to spiders. Confused, Weekes loaded up the game, and sure enough, a group of spiders had annihilated his son’s party. After some poking around, Weekes figured out the problem: if you dismounted the horse in the wrong place, all your companions’ gear would disappear. “It was because my son liked the horse so much more than anyone else had ever or will ever like the horse,” Weekes said. “I doubt we would’ve seen it, because it takes spamming the button to figure out there’s a one-in-one-thousand chance that if you’re in the right place, it’s going to wipe out your party members.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“And it’s challenging too,” said Foote, “because people say, ‘What’s in that, it’s a lot of time, what are they actually doing?’ They’re iterating. We don’t know what they’re going to do, but they’re going to be doing something.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“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. “I think that’s one of the things that plagued Destiny’s development,” said Jaime Griesemer. “We would work for a while, spend a lot of money in one direction, and then because there was this sort of impossible ideal of, ‘We’re following up the biggest game of all time, and this has to be the new biggest game of all time,’ there were several points in development where there was a total reset. And it wasn’t a graceful, ‘We go to prototype and that direction is wrong so we’re going to backtrack a little bit and go in a different direction.’ It was, I came back in from going on vacation for a week and everything I had worked on for a year was deleted. Unrecoverably, literally deleted. If I hadn’t had a copy on my laptop, it would’ve been gone forever. With no warning, no discussion, no nothing.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

“One of the biggest problems with long game development is, when you playtest the game for too long, you invent problems and you add layers to the game that don’t need to be added.”
― Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels