Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

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.

making games is sort of like shooting movies, if you had to build an entirely new camera every time you started.

“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,” a developer once told me. “You need a good engine and toolset to do this.”

After building a few technical prototypes, the team’s first major goal was to hit “vertical slice”—a small chunk of the video game designed to resemble the final product in as many ways as possible.

“There was a bunch of what I call ‘theorycraft,’” Straley said. “There’s a bunch of ideas that work on paper or when you’re talking over lunch, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ moments, but when you try to test them in the game, they fall apart quickly.”

“The thing that makes scheduling challenging is iteration,” said Rob Foote. “You have to allow for iteration if you want to make a great product.”

Iteration time was the last one percent. Blizzard’s producers tried to leave blank slates at the end of their schedules so that their development teams could push, tug, and polish every aspect of their game until they felt like they had something perfect. “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.”