I like to read and watch any story about game development. Don’t get me wrong, I like technical articles as well. But I REALLY like personal stories and post-mortems about game making. Creating video games is difficult (in fact shipping any software is difficult) and the personal stories of the people involved in such a creative process are always interesting.

Books

I read two good books recently on stories of video games creation:

• Spelunky (Boss Fight Book 11): This series of books cover a lot of classics or cult games. This book about the story of Spelunky is super interesting. It is written by the actual author of Spelunly so it has a real personal perspective to it. It is about how creative design process clashes with real world deadline. How features get cuts because of time. How systems that seemed so great on paper are lousy when implemented. And how procedural content generation is the key indie developer to create long-lasting game.
• Dungeon Hacks: a book covering the history of roguelikes from the perennial Rogue, to Angbang and Nethack. It also highlights how all of these games are really community developed and driven and how their evolution is based on all the unpaid hours their maintainers are putting for the well being of the game.

Video

There are a lot of good documentary videos. The most well-known is probably Indie Game the Movie.

GDC Vault (and the corresponding youtube channel) is also full of great postmortems. At our office, each Tuesday we watch a developement related “talk”. Often these talks are technical: new JavaScript features, how memory and cache management are paramount for game performance. But sometimes we watch great post-mortems. Here is a list of some of the best talks we have watched:

• The Early Days of Id Software. John Romero narrating the early days of one of the most influential software companies of all time. And how they were able to ship 30 games in 3 years!
• X-COM UFO Defense classic post-mortem: not the most entertaining presentation but it highlights the long history of the X-COM franchise.
• Rocket League: the road from cult classics to surprise success: great talk showcasing how this franchise evolves from fringe player to big success. Not all indie games are smash hit on their first release. Iteration is the key.
• FTL Postmortem: Designing Without a Pinch: I really like FTL as a game. It is like a sci-fi boardgame turned into a semi-turn based roguelike with pixel art. It really pushes all my buttons! And the presentation is good too. It is amazing what a great game this two man team was able to create.
• Darkest Dungeon: A Design Post-Mortem. This talk is behind the GDC Vault paywall but it is really good anyway. It highlights how much grief the developers took from a maybe too sensitive community when new changes were pushed on the EARLY ACCESS version of the game Early access was both a boon and a curse for Red Hook Studio!

NoClip

I just discovered the noclip YouTube channel. This channel is full of video game documentaries! We have added to the Tuesday Talk Video Queue two new items:

• Spelunky
• The Witness