Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier: Overview

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" by Jason Schreier. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What is Blood, Sweat, and Pixels about? Why is making a video game so hard?

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels describes the many challenges video game developers face in the industry. A couple of these includes constantly evolving technology and adhering to a schedule during development.

Read below for a brief overview of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier

Video games are meant to be fun, but making video games can be anything but. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, video game journalist Jason Schreier gives a rare look into the inner workings of the video game industry and the harsh reality of being a game developer: long hours, enormous pressure to meet deadlines, and an unpredictable, constantly changing work environment.

Schreier discusses the development cycles of 10 games, ranging from indie darlings to AAA flops, as told by developers whom Schreier interviewed. He also emphasizes that, while these stories seem extreme and unusual, they really aren’t; similar things happen in the video game industry every day.

Among gamers, Jason Schreier is a popular and credible games journalist, whose reputation is driven in part by Blood, Sweat, and Pixels itself. Schreier worked as a freelance journalist until 2011 when the gaming website Kotaku offered him a full-time job as a news reporter. He held that position for nine years before resigning—shortly thereafter, he accepted a position with Bloomberg News.

Challenge 1: Interactivity Creates Unique Challenges

Schreier explains that video game development is a hugely challenging career for numerous reasons. Game development demands creativity, flexibility, and a near-fanatical devotion to your work to overcome the unique challenges of the video game industry.

The first major challenge that game developers face comes from the very nature of video games: They’re interactive. Because games are meant to be played, instead of just watched or listened to, there are a myriad of extra factors that developers have to consider while creating them.

First, Schreier explains, video gaming is a unique medium because it has to respond to player choices. Instead of telling a single, linear story like a book or a movie, developers have to create a world that constantly moves and changes based on what the player does. That means there are nearly unlimited possibilities that developers have to account for.

For example, say the player tries to talk to an in-game character. For starters, can they even interact with that character? If so, what does the character say? Can the player choose a response? What happens based on that response? This single interaction, which might represent just a few seconds of gameplay, creates numerous possible outcomes that developers have to program into the game.

You Can’t Know if a Game Is Good Until You Play It

Schreier adds that, because video games are interactive, there are additional challenges in determining whether a game is “good”—challenges that, for example, authors and movie directors don’t face. Each of those challenges represents a large number of extra hurdles that developers have to overcome to make sure people enjoy playing their games.

First, since a player will control the game, developers have to make sure it’s user-friendly, which can be difficult to predict. For instance, the controls should be intuitive, or at least easy to learn. Anything the player needs to know at a glance, like their character’s health, must be on screen without cluttering the field of vision.

Second, Schreier explains that a good game needs to feel good: The game must respond to player input in satisfying ways. For example, there shouldn’t be a noticeable delay between entering a command and seeing the result onscreen; otherwise, the game will feel sluggish, like a car with poor handling. If there needs to be a delay, as is the case with attacks in fighting games that take time to power up and activate, that delay should be short and consistent. If a game features combat, attacks need to feel impactful—giving the sense that you’ve actually hit your opponent—which is usually accomplished through a combination of visual cues and sound effects.

Finally, a game generally needs to be challenging enough that it’s satisfying to beat, but not so challenging that it becomes frustrating. Finding the right balance is often difficult, especially for developers who know their game inside and out. These developers likely know gameplay tricks and strategies that the average player won’t, so they struggle to correctly predict how challenging the general public will find the game.

Challenge 2: Hardware and Software Change Constantly

The second major challenge that video game developers have to tackle is ever-evolving technology. As Schreier says, computers get more powerful every year, allowing for bigger games with better graphics. Consumers expect their games to keep up with that constantly changing technology.

Case Study: Dragon Age: Inquisition

To illustrate the challenges that come from changing technology, Schreier discusses the software difficulties that developers at BioWare faced while creating Dragon Age: Inquisition. This is a fantasy game in which the player controls a party of four characters on a quest to seal a mysterious portal that’s allowing monsters into the world. Inquisition is the third title in the Dragon Age series, following Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2.

To understand the challenges Dragon Age’s developers faced, it’s helpful to first understand what a “game engine” is. In this context, an engine is like a skeleton for the game—it includes basic features such as physics, graphical rendering, and the save and load functions. Game engines save a lot of time by allowing developers to build off of that preexisting design instead of creating each new game from scratch.

The game engines used for previous Dragon Age games had become outdated, and they couldn’t render the kind of graphical effects the developers wanted. Therefore, BioWare decided to create Dragon Age: Inquisition using the then-top-of-the-line Frostbite game engine.

However, Frostbite was originally designed for first-person shooters; a completely different genre of game. As a result, developers had to program custom tools to enable even basic functions in Dragon Age, like swinging a sword instead of shooting a gun.

Even after all of that extra work, the engine was unreliable, glitchy, and prone to crashing, costing developers even more time and labor. To make matters worse, the Frostbite engine got frequent updates, and each update required the Dragon Age team to manually move all of their code from the old version to the new one.

Due to these issues, Dragon Age: Inquisition was delayed by over a year. Even so, developers were still adding and testing basic features just months before its November 2014 release. This strained development cycle resulted in months of mandatory overtime for developers to get the game ready in time. (We’ll further discuss the problem of mandatory overtime later.)

Schreier adds that this story, at least, has a happy ending. Despite the numerous challenges during development, Dragon Age: Inquisition was a hit—it blew away the sales numbers from the previous two games, and it received excellent reviews from game critics.

Challenge 3: Scheduling Is Difficult

The third major challenge that game developers face is knowing exactly how long it’ll take to finish making a game. Schreier notes a few reasons for this.

First, delays and setbacks are almost inevitable during game production, due in large part to the development challenges discussed in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Second, developers might underestimate how long certain tasks will take.

Schreier adds that another common reason for delays is that games are art, and it’s hard to know when a work of art is finished. Even if a game is fully functional, it’s hard to say that it’s “done.” For example, perhaps the graphics could be improved or a new feature added to make the game even better.

The Controversial Solution: Mandatory Overtime

Schreier explains that because development cycles often take much longer than expected, “crunch”—meaning enormous amounts of mandatory overtime—is a common practice in video game development.

Game studios frequently resort to mandatory overtime to meet important deadlines, such as having demos ready for major conventions. In some cases, developers have been known to work for as much as 14 hours a day, with no days off, in the weeks leading up to a major deadline.

Such grueling schedules take a heavy toll on developers’ personal lives and mental health. Keeping up with the work requires a fervent passion for gaming and a workaholic mindset; even then, exhaustion and burnout are common problems in the video game industry.

Challenge 4: Outside Forces Interfere With Development

The final challenge we’ll discuss doesn’t relate to game development itself. Instead, it’s a product of collaboration with investors, publishers, and other people outside of the game studio whose interests in selling the product might conflict with the developers’ interests in creating it.

Games Often Require Collaboration

Schreier points out that there’s more to making a video game than writing endless lines of code. Developers also have commercial and legal matters to tackle before releasing a game, which usually means getting other people involved in the development process.

First, studios need to pay their developers and cover overhead costs. Unless a company is large enough to cover all of its costs, that means striking funding deals with people outside of the studio.

However, when investors are funding a game, they have a say in the development process. For example, they might push for a game to be released before developers think it’s ready so they can start seeing returns on their investments. They can also pull their financial support if they’re unhappy.

Second, developers often have business executives weighing in on their work, and possibly even copyright holders (if a game is based on an existing intellectual property). This can be especially frustrating because developers could find themselves taking orders from people who aren’t experienced in video game development. But without those people’s support, the game can’t get made at all.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier: Overview